On Relating Code Smells to Security Vulnerabilities

In recent years there has been an abundance of well-known software design problems that fall under a variety of different terms such as flaws or code smells. Nowadays software systems place considerable importance to security concerns related to code flaws that lead to software vulnerabilities. In this paper, we present a study to identify the relationship between code smells and vulnerabilities in software code. Our study provides information about the impact of code smells on software security and considers open source implementation of technologies under the Apache Tomcat software. The results show the relationship between the code smells and the security vulnerabilities. While most code smells, have a slight impact, one particular smell is identified to have a more considerable impact.