Engaging Stakeholders during Late Stage Security Design with Assumption Personas

Purpose – This paper aims to present an approach where assumption personas are used to engage stakeholders in the elicitation and specification of security requirements at a late stage of a system’s design. Design/methodology/approach – The author has devised an approach for developing assumption personas for use in participatory design sessions during the later stages of a system’s design. The author validates this approach using a case study in the e-Science domain. Findings – Engagement follows by focusing on the indirect, rather than direct, implications of security. More design approaches are needed for treating security at a comparatively late stage. Security design techniques should scale to working with sub-optimal input data. Originality/value – This paper contributes an approach where assumption personas engage project team members when eliciting and specifying security requirements at the late stages of a project

Usable security.

Traditionally, security is only considered as strong as its weakest link, and people were considered as the weak links (Schneier, 2003). This thinking triggers a vicious circle. (Adam & Sasse, 1999) stated that users are informed as little as possible on security mechanisms taken by IT departments, precisely because they are seen as inherently untrustworthy. Their work has shown that users were not sufficiently aware of security issues and tend to build their own (often inaccurate) models of possible security threats. Users have a low perception of threats because they lack the necessary information to understand their importance. According to (Sasse & al., 2001) blaming users for a security breach is like blaming human error rather than bad design. Security has, therefore, a human dimension that must be neither ignored nor neglected. The increase in the number of breaches may be attributed to designers who fail to sufficiently consider the human factor in their design techniques. Thus, to undo the Gordian knot of security, we must provide a human dimension to security

Gulfs of Expectation: Eliciting and Verifying Differences in Trust Expectations using Personas

Personas are a common tool used in Human Computer Interaction to represent the needs and expectations of a system’s stakeholders, but they are also grounded in large amounts of qualitative data. Our aim is to make use of this data to anticipate the differences between a user persona’s expectations of a system, and the expectations held by its developers. This paper introduces the idea of gulfs of expectation – the gap between the expectations held by a user about a system and its developers, and the expectations held by a developer about the system and its users. By evaluating these differences in expectation against a formal representation of a system, we demonstrate how differences between the anticipated user and developer mental models of the system can be verified. We illustrate this using a case study where persona characteristics were analysed to identify divergent behaviour and potential security breaches as a result of differing trust expectations