Developers struggle to program securely. Prior works have reviewed the methods used to run user-studies with developers, systematized the ancestry of security API usability recommendations, and proposed research agendas to help understand developers' knowledge, attitudes towards security and priorities. In contrast we study the research to date and abstract out categories of challenges, behaviors and interventions from the results of developer-centered studies. We analyze the abstractions and identify five misplaced beliefs or tropes about developers embedded in the core design of APIs and tools. These tropes hamper the effectiveness of interventions to help developers program securely. Increased collaboration between developers, security experts and API designers to help developers understand the security assumptions of APIs alongside creating new useful abstractions-derived from such collaborations-will lead to systems with better security.

???The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com???. Copyright Springer. [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]The contribution of this paper is an alternative mechanism for delegation, whereby users can share their credentials in such a way that it is difficult for the delegatee to re-use credentials of the delegator. An auditor in our protocol can link actions to individuals from the audit records but cannot forge audit records. We do not greatly restrict the choice of the delegation model semantics which can be adopted. Although the primary aim of our protocol is to provide support for anonymous delegation, it is still useful even if anonymity is not required at all, because of the ability to weaken trust assumptions

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???The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com???. Copyright Springer. [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]Privacy is not an explicit goal of traditional authorisation mechanisms. The contribution of this paper is an authorisation mechanism which takes identity out of the trust management envelope. Our protocol supports weak versions of anonymity and is useful even if anonymity is not required, due to the ability to weaken trust assumptions