Pragmatic Characteristics of Security Conversations: An Exploratory Linguistic Analysis

Experts suggest that engineering secure software requires a defensive mindset to be ingrained in developer culture, which could be reflected in conversation. But what does a conversation about software security in a real project look like? Linguists analyze a wide array of characteristics: lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. Pragmatics focus on identifying the style and tone of the author's language. If security requires a different mindset, then perhaps this would be reflected in the conversations' pragmatics. Our goal is to characterize the pragmatic features of conversations about security so that developers can be more informed about communication strategies regarding security concerns. We collected and annotated a corpus of conversations from 415,041 bug reports in the Chromium project. We examined five linguistic metrics related to pragmatics: formality, informativeness, implicature, politeness, and uncertainty. Our initial exploration into these data show that pragmatics plays a role, however small, in security conversations. These results indicate that the area of linguistic analysis shows promise in automatically identifying effective security communication strategies.