Security Discussions in Quantum Software Projects on GitHub - Replication Package

This repository has the dataset and code of the manuscript named “Security Discussions in Quantum Software Projects on GitHub” submitted to the Journal of Systems and Software. This study was designed and executed by the following researchers: Gastón Márquez ([email protected]) Nicolás Murúa ([email protected]) Muhammad Waseem ([email protected]) Tommi Mikkonen ([email protected]) For additional information about this study, don't hesitate to contact any of the researchers mentioned above. The documents and files in this repository are described below: data.zip: This archive contains all open and closed issues obtained from quantum software projects on GitHub. filtered.zip: This file contains all open and closed issues filtered through the RAKE algorithm. get_urls.py: This code obtains the URL of all open and closed issues of the projects. keywordsFilename.txt: This file describes the keywords used by the RAKE algorithm, which are found in the filtered open and closed issues. lda_topics_visualization_[from 5 to 50].html: These files describe an interactive visualization of the topics considering from 5 topics up to 50. scrap_urls.py: This code applies web scraping to obtain the open and closed issues from GitHub. securityTopics.ipynb: This file contains the Jupyter Notebook of all codes to extract topics using LDA. topic_files.zip: This file contains all the words associated with the 10 topics used in the study. topicsFinal.txt: This file contains the result of applying LDA for 5 to 50 topics. urls.zip: This file contains the URLs of all open and closed issues of the quantum software projects. Abstract Quantum software engineering is an emerging field that leverages quantum computing and software development to address contemporary computational challenges. A significant concern in this domain is security, which has become a critical issue in quantum software engineering. Despite advances in quantum computing security, there is a lack of empirical evidence examining the primary security concerns of developers within the context of quantum software engineering. This paper presents a study that identifies, describes, and analyzes topics discussed by developers regarding open and closed issues of quantum software projects hosted on GitHub. Of the 18 identified projects, 9,070 open and closed issues were obtained, of which 201 were related to security. Using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm, ten topics were identified. Furthermore, we identified the key security concepts that developers addressed in the issues, the majority of which were oriented towards cryptography. This study serves as a precedent for a practical analysis of the identification and characterization of security topics, as well as the initial insights into security design decisions that developers discuss in quantum software projects.