Moving from the design of usable security technologies to the design of useful secure applications

ABSTRACT

Recent results from usability studies of security systems have shown that end-users find them difficult to adopt and use. In this paper we argue that improving the usability of security technology is only one part of the problem, and that what is missed is the need to design usable and useful systems that provide security to end-users in terms of the applications that they use and the tasks they want to achieve. We propose alternate ways of building and integrating security technologies into applications and usability methods for evaluating how successful our prototypes are. We believe that the end results of designing usable and useful (from the end-user perspective) systems will be secure applications which will reflect the needs of users who are increasingly using computers away from the office and in a wider variety of networked configurations.

REFERENCES

• 1: Anne Adams , Martina Angela Sasse, Users are not the enemy, Communications of the ACM, v.42 n.12, p.40-46, Dec. 1999 [doi>10.1145/322796.322806]
• 2: R. Anderson, Why Information Security is Hard-An Economic Perspective, Proceedings of the 17th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, p.358, December 10-14, 2001
• 3: Ross J. Anderson, Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 2001
• 4: D. Balfanz, D. K. Smetters, P. Stewart, and H. C. Wong. Talking to strangers: Authentication in ad-hoc wireless networks. In Proceedings of Network and Distributed System Security Symposium 2002 (NDSS'02), San Diego, CA, February 2002.
• 5: D. J. Barrett and R. E. Silverman. SSH The Secure Shell. O'Reilly, 2001.
• 6: T. A. Berson. Cryptographic abundance. Technology Review, 105:90--93, 2002.
• 7: Hugh Beyer, Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1997
• 8: Bob Blakley, The Emperor's old armor, Proceedings of the 1996 workshop on New security paradigms, p.2-16, September 17-20, 1996, Lake Arrowhead, California, United States [doi>10.1145/304851.304855]
• 9: R. Blakley. Security design patterns. http://www.opengroup.org/security/gsp.htm.
• 10: Dan Boneh , Matthew K. Franklin, Identity-Based Encryption from the Weil Pairing, Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology, p.213-229, August 19-23, 2001
• 11: R. Dhamija and A. Perrig. Dejà vu: A user study using images for authentication. In Proceedings of the 9th USENIX Security Symposium, 2000.
• 12: T. Dierks and C. Allen. The TLS Protocol Version 1.0. IETF - Network Working Group, The Internet Society, January 1999. RFC 2246.
• 13: W. Keith Edwards , Rebecca E. Grinter, At Home with Ubiquitous Computing: Seven Challenges, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Ubiquitous Computing, p.256-272, September 30-October 02, 2001, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• 14: W. Keith Edwards , Mark W. Newman , Jana Z. Sedivy , Trevor F. Smith , Dirk Balfanz , D. K. Smetters , H. Chi Wong , Shahram Izadi, Using speakeasy for ad hoc peer-to-peer collaboration, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 16-20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA [doi>10.1145/587078.587114]
• 15: C. M. Ellison. Establishing identity without certification authorities. In Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Security Symposium, San Jose, July 1996.
• 16: Refactoring: improving the design of existing code, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1999
• 17: Erich Gamma , Richard Helm , Ralph Johnson , John Vlissides, Design patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1995
• 18: Rebecca E. Grinter, Supporting articulation work using software configuration management systems, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, v.5 n.4, p.447-465, 1996 [doi>10.1007/BF00136714]
• 19: Jonathan Grudin, Why CSCW applications fail: problems in the design and evaluation of organization of organizational interfaces, Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, p.85-93, September 26-28, 1988, Portland, Oregon, United States [doi>10.1145/62266.62273]
• 20: U. Holmström. User-centered design of security software. In Human Factors in Telecommunications, Copenhagen, Denmark, May 1999.
• 21: U. Jendricke , D. Gerd tom Markotten, Usability meets security - the Identity-Manager as your personal security assistant for the Internet, Proceedings of the 16th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, p.344, December 11-15, 2000
• 22: I. Jermyn, A. Mayer, F. Monrose, M. K. Reiter, and A. D. Rubin. The design and analysis of graphical passwords. In Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Security Symposium, Washington DC, 1999.
• 23: Dean Povey, Optimistic security: a new access control paradigm, Proceedings of the 1999 workshop on New security paradigms, p.40-45, September 22-24, 1999, Caledon Hills, Ontario, Canada [doi>10.1145/335169.335188]
• 24: M. A. Sasse , S. Brostoff , D. Weirich, Transforming the 'Weakest Link' — a Human/Computer Interaction Approach to Usable and Effective Security, BT Technology Journal, v.19 n.3, p.122-131, July 2001 [doi>10.1023/A:1011902718709]
• 25: J. G. Steiner, C. Neuman, and J. I. Schiller. Kerberos: An authentication service for open network systems. In USENIX Association, editor, USENIX Conference Proceedings (Dallas, TX, USA), pages 191--202, Berkeley, CA, USA, Winter 1988. USENIX Association.
• 26: Dirk Weirich , Martina Angela Sasse, Pretty good persuasion: a first step towards effective password security in the real world, Proceedings of the 2001 workshop on New security paradigms, September 10-13, 2001, Cloudcroft, New Mexico [doi>10.1145/508171.508195]
• 27: A. Whitten and J. D. Tygar. Why Johnny can't encrypt: A usability evaluation of PGP 5.0. In Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Security Symposium, Washington, DC, August 1999.
• 28: M. E. Zurko, R. Simon, and T. Sanfilippo. A user-centered, modular authorization service built on an RBAC foundation. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, pages 57--71, 1999.
• 29: Mary Ellen Zurko , Richard T. Simon, User-centered security, Proceedings of the 1996 workshop on New security paradigms, p.27-33, September 17-20, 1996, Lake Arrowhead, California, United States [doi>10.1145/304851.304859]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.6 Security and Protection

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human factors

General Terms:
Human Factors, Security

Keywords:
usable security