Konstantin Beznosov

16 October 2005

Abstract: Although usability has been acknowledged by the security community as one of the design goals back in 1970s, there is dearth of applications of HCI methods to the domain of computer security in general and security administration in particular. This lack of research attention even became a subject of a journal publication. HCI and security researchers are merely starting to build a network of interested people and explore opportunities for collaboration. There was only one published attempt toward addressing usability in security administration of distributed applications. The work was concerned mostly with evaluating the administrative GUI usability by applying some HCI techniques. During this session, I will briefly describe the problem domain of security administration usability and sketch some ideas for research, in the hope of promoting a discussion on the subject and identifying points and directions for future cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Keyword(s): usable security administration ;usable security; HOT Admin

Published in: Konstantin Beznosov, "Human Factor in Security Administration: Brainstorming the Research Directions," presentation given at SEEDS, Vancouver, BC, Canada, SEEDS, ECE, UBC, 2 December, 2003. :