Learning from "shadow security": understanding non-compliant behaviours to improve information security management

This thesis examines employee interaction with information security in large organisations. It starts by revisiting past research in user-centred security and security management, identifying three research questions that examine (1) employee understanding of the need for security, (2) the challenges security introduces to their work, together with their responses to those challenges, and (3) how to use the emerging knowledge to improve existing organisational security implementations. Preliminary examination of an available interview data set, led to the emergence of three additional research questions, aiming to identify (4) employee actions after bypassing organisational security policy, (5) their response to perceived lack of security support from the organisation, and (6) the impact of trust relationships in the organisation on their security behaviours. The research questions were investigated in two case studies inside two large organisations. Different data collection (200 interviews and 2129 surveys) and analysis techniques (thematic analysis and grounded theory) were combined to improve outcome validity and allow for generalisability of the findings. The primary contribution of this thesis is the identification of a new paradigm for understanding employee responses to high-friction security, the shadow security: employees adapt existing mechanisms or processes, or deploy other self-devised solutions, when they consider the productivity impact of centrally-procured security as unacceptable. An additional contribution is the identification of two trust relationships in organisational environments that influence employee security behaviours: organisationemployee trust (willingness of the organisation to remain exposed to the actions of its employees, expecting them to behave securely), and inter-employee trust (willingness of employees to act in a way that renders themselves or the organisation vulnerable to the actions of another member of the organisation). The above contributions led to the creation of a structured process to better align security with organisational productive activity, together with a set of relevant metrics to assess the effectiveness of attempted improvements. The thesis concludes by presenting a case study attempting to apply the above process in an organisation, also presenting the emerging lessons for both academia and industry

Towards usable generation and enforcement of trust evidence from programmers’ intent

Programmers develop code with a sense of purpose and with expectations on how units of code should interact with other units of code. But this intent of programmers is typically implicit and undocumented, goes beyond considerations of functional correctness, and may depend on trust assumptions that programmers make. At present, neither programming languages nor development environments offer a means of articulating such intent in a manner that could be used for controlling whether software executions meet such intentions and their associated expectations. We here study how extant research on trust can inform approaches to articulating programmers’ intent so that it may help with creating trust evidence for more trustworthy interaction of software units

Security Education against Phishing: A Modest Proposal for a Major Rethink

User education must focus on challenging and correcting the misconceptions that guide current user behavior. To date, user education on phishing has tried to persuade them to check URLs and a number of other indicators, with limited success. The authors evaluate a novel antiphishing tool in a realistic setting—participants had to buy tickets under time pressure and lost money if they bought from bad sites. Although none of the participants bought from sites the tool clearly identified as bad, 40 percent risked money with sites flagged as potentially risky, but offering bargains. When tempted by a good deal, participants didn't focus on the warnings; rather, they looked for signs they thought confirmed a site's trustworthiness

Why trust seals don't work: a study of user perceptions and behavior.

Trust seals, such as the VeriSign and TRUSTe logos, are widely used to indicate a website is reputable. But how much protection do they offer to online shoppers? We conducted a study in which 60 experienced online shop-pers rated 6 websites – with and without trust seals - based on how trustworthy they perceived them to be. Eye track-ing data reveals that 38% of participants failed to notice any of the trust seals present. When seals were noticed, the ratings assigned to each website were significantly higher than for the same website without a seal, but qualitative analysis of the interview data revealed significant misconceptions of their meaning (e.g. “presence of seals automati-cally legitimizes any website”). Participants tended to rely on self-developed – but inaccurate – heuristics for as-sessing trustworthiness (e.g. perceived investment in website development, or references to other recognizable enti-ties). We conclude that current trust seals currently do not offer effective protection against scam websites; and sug-gest that other mechanisms – such as automatic verification of authenticity are required to support consumers’ trust decisions

Learning from “Shadow Security”: Why understanding non-compliance provides the basis for effective security

Over the past decade, security researchers and practitioners have tried to understand why employees do not comply with organizational security policies and mechanisms. Past re-search has treated compliance as a binary decision: people comply, or they do not. From our analysis of 118 in-depth interviews with individuals (employees in a large multinational organization) about security non-compliance, a 3rd response emerges: shadow security. This describes the instances where security-conscious employees who think they cannot comply with the prescribed security policy create a more fitting alter-native to the policies and mechanisms created by the organization’s official security staff. These workarounds are usually not visible to official security and higher management – hence ‘shadow security’. They may not be as secure as the ‘official’ policy would be in theory, but they reflect the best compromise staff can find between getting the job done and managing the risks that the assets they understand face. We conclude that rather than trying to ‘stamp out’ shadow security practices, organizations should learn from them: they provide a starting point ‘workable’ security: solutions that offer effective security and fit with the organization’s business, rather than impede it

"Comply or die" is dead: Long live security-aware principal agents

Information security has adapted to the modern collaborative organisational nature, and abandoned "command-and-control" approaches of the past. But when it comes to managing employee's information security behaviour, many organisations still use policies proscribing behaviour and sanctioning non-compliance. Whilst many organisations are aware that this "comply or die" approach does not work for modern enterprises where employees collaborate, share, and show initiative, they do not have an alternative approach to fostering secure behaviour. We present an interview analysis of 126 employees' reasons for not complying with organisational policies, identifying the perceived conflict of security with productive activities as the key driver for non-compliance and confirm the results using a survey of 1256 employees. We conclude that effective problem detection and security measure adaptation needs to be de-centralised - employees are the principal agents who must decide how to implement security in specific contexts. But this requires a higher level of security awareness and skills than most employees currently have. Any campaign aimed at security behaviour needs to transform employee's perception of their role in security, transforming them to security-aware principal agents

"Shadow security" as a tool for the learning organization

Traditionally, organizations manage information security through policies and mechanisms that employees are expected to comply with. Non-compliance with security is regarded as undesirable, and often sanctions are threatened to deter it. But in a recent study, we identified a third category of employee security behavior: shadow security. This consists of workarounds employees devise to ensure primary business goals are achieved; they also devise their own security measures to counter the risks they understand. Whilst not compliant with official policy, and sometimes not as secure as employees think, shadow security practices reflect the working compromise staff find between security and "getting the job done". We add to this insight in this paper by discussing findings from a new interview study in a different organization. We identified additional shadow security practices, and show how they can be transformed into effective and productivity-enabling security solutions, within the framework of a learning organization

Fixing Security Together: Leveraging trust relationships to improve security in organizations

Current approaches to information security focused on deploying security mechanisms, creating policies and communicating those to employees. Little consideration was given to how policies and mechanisms affect trust relationships in an organization, and in turn security behavior. Our analysis of 208 in-depth interviews with employees in two large multinational organizations found two trust relationships: between the organization and its employees (organization-employee trust), and between employees (inter-employee trust). When security interferes with employees’ ability to complete work tasks, they rely on inter-employee trust to overcome those obstacles (e.g. sharing a password with a colleague who is locked out of a system and urgently needs access). Thus, non-compliance is a collaborative action, which develops inter-employee trust further, as employees now become “partners in crime”. The existence of these two relationships also presents employees with a clear dilemma: either try to comply with cumbersome security (and honor organization-employee trust) or help their colleagues by violating security (preserving inter-employee trust). We conclude that designers of security policies and mechanisms need to support both types of trust, and discuss how to leverage trust to achieve effective security protection. This can enhance organizational cooperation to tackle security challenges, provide motivation for employees to behave securely, while also reducing the need for expensive physical and technical security mechanism

“Technology Should Be Smarter Than This!”: A Vision for Overcoming the Great Authentication Fatigue

Security researchers identified 15 years ago that passwords create too much of a burden on users. But despite much research activity on alternative authentication mechanisms, there has been very little change for users in practice, and the implications for individual and organisations productivity are now severe. I argue that - rather than looking for alternative 'front-end' solutions, we must re-think the nature of authentication: we must drastically reduce the number of explicit authentication events users have to participate in, and use advanced technologies to implicitly authenticate users, without disrupting their productive activity. © 2014 Springer International Publishing