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

  • Authors:
  • D. K. Smetters;R. E. Grinter

  • Affiliations:
  • PARC, Palo Alto, CA;PARC, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2002 workshop on New security paradigms
  • Year:
  • 2002

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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.