Empower New Code Citizens to Reflect and Communicate on Code Security

Creating secure software code requires software engineers to elicit and 
follow the security requirements of the system they are building. 
Software engineer teams might not have the security expertise to 
approach this angle of software development confidently. With the 
democratisation of access to software development and deployment, 
software are often built by developers with neither software engineering 
expertise nor security knowledge, a situation that could make systems 
vulnerable. We present approaches based on short games, knowledge cards 
and serious game jams designed to help these non-experts gain the 
knowledge and ability to communicate on code security. These are some of 
the outputs of the Secrious project published recently in the IEEE 
Security & Privacy magazine, and in the ACM Games and Computer Standards 
& Interfaces journals. The project was supported by the Engineering and 
Physical Research Council (Grant EP/T017511/1 "Serious Coding: A Game 
Approach To Security For The New Code-Citizens"). 

Manuel Maarek from Heriot-Watt University is visiting the Université de 
Rennes/IRISA as part of the MLSEAN Machine Learning based software 
systems SEcurity ANalysis project supported by the UK-France Science, 
Innovation, and Technology Researcher Mobility Scheme.