Assessing Vulnerability of Students’ Programming Projects: Application of Testing Tools and Estimation of Checklist Effect on Code Quality

Web application security is one of the mandatory elements in system development, however, the proper level of security measures among beginner level programmers is still an issue. This paper examines how security checklists impact the secure development practices and code quality in novice developers, within web application development using the Flask framework. In a controlled experiment, four university students were asked to develop a sleep tracking system using the Flask web framework, then later asked to improve it by either using a short or a comprehensive security checklist. This research studies how such checklists drive the identification and mitigation of common security vulnerabilities, such as XSS, SQL injection, and poor key management. Using automated and manual code reviews, this study assesses the efficiency of such checklists in improving both security and general code quality, and hence their potential value in academic and professional environments.