Usable Security

A lot of breaches occur not because of human errors, but due to poor software design which doesn’t take into account user context and human factors. — Tldr; The research proposal emphasises that software must be both secure and usable for users to appropriately use security features. There are many factors at the root of why usable security doesn’t make it into the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The most pressing ones are:

Understanding the benefits and drawbacks to adopting a secure programming language. — Security vulnerabilities are discovered in production code on a regular basis. They can cost companies large sums of money and risk the exposure of millions of users’ data. Many of these vulnerabilities arise from memory safety bugs, which allow attackers to illegally access memory containing potentially sensitive information. …

Further reporting on how people send important documents. — People often have to send an important document to someone they do not already know at least once or twice per year, such as financial documents to a new tax preparer, medical forms to a specialist’s office, or something else. However, it is not always clear how to do this…

Digging deeper into longitudinal tracking transparency. — Nathan Reitinger, Lilly Hackworth, Annika Hildebrandt, Hazel Murray, Bruce Wen, Michelle Mazurek, and Blase Ur In 2012, Target ramped up its practice of tailored advertising by intently focusing on pregnant women, providing these women with a plethora of baby-themed advertisements. Unremarkable as this may seem today, the practice at the…

When we design a secure system, the login functionality will be the obvious first place that will pop in into your mind. For example, if your system has a login page with a username and a password. In the user registration process, we do think a lot about the user…

Humans are incapable of securely storing high-quality cryptographic keys, and they have unacceptable speed and accuracy when performing cryptographic operations (They are also large, expensive to maintain, difficult to manage, and they pollute the environment. It is astonishing that these devices continue to be manufactured and deployed. …