Developers Struggle with Authentication in Blazor WebAssembly

TL;DR

This paper analyzes security challenges faced by developers using WebAssembly, especially in authentication within Blazor WebAssembly, based on a study of Stack Overflow questions, highlighting common issues and proposing solutions.

Contribution

It provides a classification of developer issues related to WebAssembly security, with a focus on authentication problems in Blazor WebAssembly, and offers practical suggestions to address these challenges.

Findings

Authentication is a major issue in Blazor WebAssembly.

Most questions relate to bug fixes, feature implementation, and configuration.

Six common authentication issues are identified and discussed.

Abstract

WebAssembly is a growing technology to build cross-platform applications. We aim to understand the security issues that developers encounter when adopting WebAssembly. We mined WebAssembly questions on Stack Overflow and identified 359 security-related posts. We classified these posts into 8 themes, reflecting developer intentions, and 19 topics, representing developer issues in this domain. We found that the most prevalent themes are related to bug fix support, requests for how to implement particular features, clarification questions, and setup or configuration issues. We noted that the topmost issues attribute to authentication in Blazor WebAssembly. We discuss six of them and provide our suggestions to clear these issues in practice.