Informed Consent

Purpose of study This is a study in Web security that is being conducted by Faiza Iqbal, master degree student at Gjovik University College in Gjovik, Norway. The purpose of this study is to examine the benefits of proposed secure web application development guidelines.

What will be done: First you will complete a survey/test, which will take 20-30 minutes to complete. This survey includes questions about most common security vulnerability i-e Cross-Site Scripting  and general practices to avoid them during web application development. Then you will be given some proposed guidelines or "best practices" to avoid them during web application development. You have to study them and try to understand how you can follow those practices during development. Finally, again you will be asked to solve a similar questionnaires which will help to assess your understanding after studying given guidelines.

Benefits of this study: By participating in this experiment, you will get basic training of secure web application development and knowledge of common web vulnerability and relevent prevention techniques. The results of this experiment can help to make some important conclusions, for example: it can help to analyze the credibility of this kind of trainings: give a new developer some guidelines and believe that now they have basic knowledge of secure web application development, proposed guidelines are actually helpful or not, how developers think about these guidelines and are they actually interested in learning about secure application development, and much more.

Risks or discomforts: No risks or discomforts are anticipated from taking part in this study. If you feel uncomfortable with questions, you can withdraw from the study altogether. If you decide to quit at any time before you have finished the questionnaire, your answers will NOT be recorded.

Confidentiality: Your responses will be kept completely confidential. We will NOT know your IP address when you respond to the Internet survey. We will ask you to include your name or id so that two questionnaires from same person can be traced. You will be asked to give your email address so that we can contact you to notify about experiment proceedings. Only the researcher will see your individual survey responses. The list of e-mail address and ids of participants will be stored electronically in a secure folder. After we have finished data collection and have sent you a copy of the results of the study, we will destroy the list of participants' e-mail addresses and ids.

Decision to quit at any time: Your participation is voluntary; you are free to withdraw your participation from this study at any time. If you do not want to continue, you can simply leave this survey. If you do not click on the "submit" button at the end of the survey, your answers and participation will not be recorded.

How the findings will be used: The results from the study will be presented in educational settings and at university, and the results might be published in a professional journal in the field of web security. The proposed guidelines will be open for anyone to use along with the results of this research.

Contact information: If you have concerns or questions about this study, please contact Faiza Iqbal at faiza.iqbal@hig.no .

On receiving your questionnaire responses, it will be assumed that you have read this information and agree to participate in this research, with the knowledge that you are free to withdraw your participation at any time without penalty.