Study shows programmers will take the easy way out and not implement proper password security
In an experiment that involved 43 programmers hired via the Freelancer.com platform, University of Bonn academics have discovered that developers tend to take the easy way out and write code that stores user passwords in an unsafe manner.
For their study, the German academics asked a group of Java programmers to write a user registration system for a fake social network. The results show that the level of understanding of what “secure passwords” mean differs greatly in the web development community.
Paying developers higher rates didn’t help considerably, researchers said. However, the research team found that giving programmers specific instructions to implement a secure password storage system did yield better results than not saying anything at all and then expecting developers to think of security by themselves.
