Cited by 259Software Engineering ResearchWeb Application Security VulnerabilitiesSecurity and Verification in Computing

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 33 of the 33 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; 4 of the 12 sources its claims cite were checked for support.

Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?

Open access
Perry, Neil, Srivastava, Megha, Kumar, Deepak, Boneh, Dan·2023·Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Abstract

AI code assistants have emerged as powerful tools that can aid in the software development life-cycle and can improve developer productivity. Unfortunately, such assistants have also been found to produce insecure code in lab environments, raising significant concerns about their usage in practice. In this paper, we conduct a user study to examine how users interact with AI code assistants to solve a variety of security related tasks. Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant wrote significantly less secure code than those without access to an assistant. Participants with access to an AI assistant were also more likely to believe they wrote secure code, suggesting that such tools may lead users to be overconfident about security flaws in their code. To better inform the design of future AI-based code assistants, we release our user-study apparatus to researchers seeking to build on our work.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3576915.3623157

Cites

33 of 33 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

81 Own result · 18 Own method · 17 Own interpretation · 4 No full text of the sources · 3 Supported · 3 Sources not found · 1 Supported so far · 1 No basis given

Show all 74 claims

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 35
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 26
  • The quote only partly states this claim. 5
54 of 54
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The AI assistant used in the experiment group is representative of AI code assistants generally.

    “Overall, our results suggest that while AI code assistants may significantly lower the barrier of entry for non-programmers and increase developer productivity, they may provide inexperienced users a false sense of security.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The security-related programming tasks used in the study are representative of real-world security-related programming tasks.

    “We chose questions that were self contained, could be solved in a short amount of time, and covered a wide breadth of potential security mistakes that are commonly taught in introductory computer security courses.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The AI assistant (codex-davinci-002) lacks information about the structure of file paths or symlinks.

    “Since the AI assistant does not have information about the structure of file paths or symlinks”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    codex-davinci-002 is language-agnostic.

    “as codex-davinci-002 itself is language-agnostic”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The study is the first user study to examine how people interact with an AI code assistant to solve security-related tasks across multiple programming languages.

    “We conducted the first user study examining how people interact with an AI code assistant (built with OpenAI's Codex) to solve a variety of security related tasks across different programming languages.”
5 of 5

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

3 of 3

Citations

Cites

Show all 23 references

Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. D. Boneh and V. Shoup. 6.1 Definition of a message authentication code, pages 214--217. Version 0.5 edition, 2020.
  2. G. Sandoval, H. Pearce, T. Nys, R. Karri, B. Dolan-Gavitt, and S. Garg. Security implications of large language model code assistants: A user study. https://arxiv. org/abs/2208.09727, 2022.
  3. M. Tabachnyk and S. Nikolov. Ml-enhanced code completion improves developer productivity. https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/07/ml-enhanced-code-completionimproves.html, Jul 2022.

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Metadata

Authors
Perry, N., Srivastava, M., Kumar, D., & Boneh, D.
Affiliations
  • Stanford University (US)
  • University of California San Diego (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Publisher
ACM
Published
2023-11-15
Pages
2785-2799
ISSN
1543-7221 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4388858772
Cited by
259
References
23
Citations by year
2026: 99 · 2025: 83 · 2024: 55 · 2023: 22
FWCI
66.42
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation (DGE-165651 8, 1656518)
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Software Engineering Research
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Web Application Security Vulnerabilities
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Hardware and Architecture › Security and Verification in Computing
Keywords
software security, security vulnerabilities, developer productivity

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