The thesis aims to compare multiple cryptographic libraries regarding their usability (how much they lead developers to produce secure solutions).
Usable security starts to gain popularity in the developer community -- emphasizing the use of secure defaults, understandable documentation, well-formulated error messages, etc. Recently, multiple new "usable" libraries were created (e.g. NaCl for C or KeyCzar for Python). However, comparing these libraries with the old ones is complicated since usability is hard to measure and we still lack common standards in this respect.
This thesis should summarize and categorize the usability requirements developers may have for cryptographic libraries. For multiple (at least two) categories, the appropriate measurable properties should be identified. Furthermore, a proof-of-concept usability evaluation should be performed with respect to the chosen categories. The evaluation should compare at least four cryptographic libraries including at least one recent "usable" library and at least one older and commonly used library. The created evaluation scheme should function for library evaluation/comparison as well as to guide the development of new security APIs.