Secure Interaction Design

Pingster writes "Next week, ICICS 2002 will take place in Singapore. Out of 40 papers at the conference, there will be just one paper that looks at human factors. Though many people know that usability problems can render even the strongest security useless, the security community has only recently started paying attention to usability issues. More serious thinking about usability and security is desperately needed. The paper proposes ten interaction design principles. Maybe you'll find them obvious; maybe you'll disagree with them entirely. Great! Let's have a discussion."

Comments

A note on usability and security from my exp...

[Salubri]

What seems like an eternity ago myself and a friend were the admins of a beowulf cluster for a university physics department. Often times the user themselves would destroy any system security even before things like the interface was an issue. I can't tell you the number of times I'd walk into the lab where the cluster was stored only to find that someone using the machine logged into the mother node as root, left the machine sitting open to the world in an unlocked lab for 8 hour spans, taped the root password to the monitor, and then insisted that the highest priority we face be tightening up security, because they were having issues that the firewall wasn't detecting. ~growls~ At any rate... back to the debate between useability and security.

In my opinion, it's rare that I've seen anything blend robust power with a simple user interface. Usually in order to make things "more intuitive" for the user they've stripped down a lot of the options from the user. The logic behind this was that if the user has fewer choices, there's less the user has to know or think about when configuring something. On the other side of the coin, I've seen programs that are completely customizable, but you spend three days RTFMing trying to figure out why it doesn't work only to find out that the hexidecimal error message its spitting out is because there is a hidden space where there shouldnt be or some other small syntax error in a 30 page text configuration file.

The best ways that I've seen usability and functionality blended (which is the same as useability vs. any function such as security) have been when the simple choices were offered, but with an option right next to the choice to allow for greater customization of that specific choice.

Anyways, I've probably ranted enough for now. Best get back to work.

secure UIs apply to more than just crypto tools

[Jim McCoy]

Why this work does apply almost entirely to GUI issues this is because the GUI is the tool through which 99.99% of the world uses a computer. For related work that shows some better examples by the same author I would suggest that you take a look at this paper (sorry for citing it Ping...) which provides some nice examples of how a GUI that explains the security implications of certain preference settings can be used for a mp3 player, etc. This paper is writen from the capability-semantics perspective, so the standard unix security model is already outclassed, but it will give you a better idea of how security and UI are related.

Re:1 in 40 seems fair

[El]

Historically, in the vast majority of security compromises have been acheived though "human engineering", e.g. calling somebody up and asking them for their password, while in very few cases the technological measures have actually failed. So it appears the human factors DOES require a lot more attention.