Title | Mining Security Documentation Practices in OpenAPI Descriptions |
Publication Type | Conference Paper |
Year of Publication | 2025 |
Authors | Hurtado, D. Carolina M., S. Serbout, and C. Pautasso |
Conference Name | 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA) |
Month | March |
Conference Location | Odense, Denmark |
Keywords | API Analytics, OpenAPI, Security |
Abstract | Security is an integral requirement of any trustworthy software architecture, particularly critical for application programming interfaces (APIs). In this paper, we survey security documentation practices, specifically API security schemes related to authentication and authorization, by mining a large collection of OpenAPI descriptions retrieved from open-source GitHub repositories. Our study focuses on detecting existing security schemes and evaluating their prevalence and positioning within API descriptions. We distinguish whether security schemes are introduced locally (at the path or operation level) or globally (for the entire API). Our analysis highlights scenarios where security schemes are featured in APIs in different proportions over time, thus tracking whether the API documentation tends to include more (or less) security details as the API evolves. |
Citation Key | apiace:2025:icsa |
Refereed Designation | Refereed |
Submitted by cp on