Slashdot Mirror
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."
and other confusing concepts and they'll quickly go into Dummy mode and do whatever you tell them to. For this reason we should make it all more complex, so that those who understand will have an easier time controlling those who don't.
Give a man a fire he'll be warm for a night. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Yes, but there are degrees to everything.
I can make you have to enter in a 25 character password, changed daily. Extremely inconvenient - and really doesn't add to security, since you'll just write it down all the time.
Finding where you can get the "biggest bang for the buck", IE: the best increase in security for the least inconvenience, is a very important thing. If we stop making security needlessly a pain in the ass, then people will stop thinking that secure=impossible to use.
I respectfully disagree. Although securing things has typically made using it harder, there are certainly measure you can take to make it transparent to the user, SSL and SSH being the leading examples. Sure, they do little to secure the machines your talking to, but they virtually remove the fear that someone listening in on the conversation can see what you're doing (and as wireless tech becomes more popular, this kind of ease-of-use will be vastly more important).
The lack of ease of use security systems are often their greatest security flaw. Good security often make themselves hard to use, and thus undermine their own security. IE
- 10 character passwords, non-dictionary words, alpha-numeric. Safe, but can't remember them. So you write it on a post it note.
- Multiple levels of security. This means multiple usernames and passwords. This means the user keeps a list of them in their palm pilot/wallet.
- Secure systems invite back-doors (same as leaving a key under your door-mat...stupid, but very useful if you lock your keys inside).
Some companies base their security around no-one knowing anything about it. Microsoft is trying to do great things with UI the ease of use, but in doing so they destroy security.
If you do *not* have an easy to use high-security system, people *won't* use it! And if they don't use it, it is totally useless. People will always pick ease of use over security. They will pick IE and OE because things "just work", they will write their passwords on post-it notes on their screens, cause they can't remember them, they will leave keys under doormats.
I already communicated to my sysadmin that my top security usability concern is that the post-it note with my password on my monitor peels off after about two months. We need better adhesives on our post-it notes.
Saying that security isn't convinient glosses over the details, and when you examine security in practice there are a lot of things you can do to increase security and ease people's access.
eg. Rather than 40 character passwords use swipe cards (yes, the card could be stolen, but then at 40 characters length the password would probably be written down somewhere and that bit of paper could be stolen too -- being the point entirely).
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
All he did was restate the summary of the paper, and he gets a +4.
yah, but the paper is 21 pages.
A classic example...if someone needs to read 21 pages to use a security system, they won't use it. if they can get the paper in a 3 point summary, they will use it. It proves that useability is important, possibly more so then the system itself.
What a crock. You obviuosly have never really done much secure system work. Security and usability are only in contention when people who only understand one side of the argument start dealing with people who only understand the other side of the problem. It is possible to have secure systems that do not place a significantly larger usage burden on the user if they are designed correctly, and Ping is one of the few people out there who I know has been thinking about this for more than fifteen minutes. This is not about security being convenient, it is about meeting security requirements without going the extreme that you suggest and making the useless system. Sometimes this requires that you add a bit of additional effort on the part of the user, but often it means that you actually use the UI to let the user know that an action they are about to perform has security implications that might not be obvious to a casual user.
There is an old, probably apocryphal story about how someone ran a test on a bunch of users that presented them with a bunch of modal dialog windows in the midst of a task and one of the windows asked the user if they wanted to reformat the disk. When the users get bored or frustrated with poor UI design they will often switch into auto-pilot and in this case they blindly hit the "yes" button because that was the proper response to all of the other modal dialogs that had been interrupting their work. When the users complained the person running the test pointed out that the system asked them if they wanted to reformat the disk and they had said yes.
Security and UI should never be considered independant items in system design, because if you can't communicate what is happening and the consequences of actions to users then the only security policy possible is the brain-dead ones that you suggest.
Have you actually read the paper? If you have only read the ten one-sentence principles, you might have misinterpreted that one. The authors do not advocate offering an alternative, non-natural way of doing things that is insecure. In fact, that statement is not even about offering multiple ways to achieve the same task (e.g. "menu item or keyboard shortcut," or "dialog or wizard"). The idea is simply that using the system securely should be easier (i.e. less resistance) than using the system in an insecure way. In other words, whenever you're about to do something that is not secure, you'll face resistance, so taking the path of least resistance will be most secure.
I think a huge part the principle could be more simply described as "secure by default," which I hope everyone will agree with. Another important goal mentioned in the paper is "to keep the user's motivations and the security goals aligned with each other," i.e. you want to make sure that while working with your software, the user will never think about granting certain permissions simply because that would be more convinient.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
The seem to have forgotten at least one principle: The user must NOT be an idiot.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
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.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney