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Usable set-up of runtime security policies
Linköping University, The Institute of Technology. Linköping University, Department of Computer and Information Science, Database and information techniques.
Linköping University, Department of Computer and Information Science, Database and information techniques. Linköping University, The Institute of Technology.
2007 (English)In: Information Management & Computer Security, ISSN 0968-5227, Vol. 15, no 5, p. 394-407Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Purpose: This paper aims to present concrete and verified guidelines for enhancing the usability and security of software that delegates security decisions to lay users and captures these user decisions as a security policy.

Design/methodology/approach: This work is an exploratory study. The authors hypothesised that existing tools for runtime set-up of security policies are not sufficient. As this proved true, as shown in earlier work, they apply usability engineering with user studies to advance the state-of-the-art.

Findings: Little effort has been spent on how security policies can be set up by the lay users for whom they are intended. This work identifies what users want and need for a successful runtime set-up of security policies.

Practical implications: Concrete and verified guidelines are provided for designers who are faced with the task of delegating security decisions to lay users.

Originality/value: The devised guidelines focus specifically on the set-up of runtime security policies and therefore on the design of alert windows.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2007. Vol. 15, no 5, p. 394-407
Keywords [en]
Business policy, Data security, Internet, Java
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-14435DOI: 10.1108/09685220710831134OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-14435DiVA, id: diva2:23500
Note

Special Issue of Information Management & Computer Security: Selected Papers from the HAISA 2007 Symposium.

Available from: 2007-04-27 Created: 2007-04-27 Last updated: 2018-01-13
In thesis
1. Usable Security Policies for Runtime Environments
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Usable Security Policies for Runtime Environments
2007 (English)Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

The runtime environments provided by application-level virtual machines such as the Java Virtual Machine or the .NET Common Language Runtime are attractive for Internet application providers because the applications can be deployed on any platform that supports the target virtual machine. With Internet applications, organisations as well as end users face the risk of viruses, trojans, and denial of service attacks. Virtual machine providers are aware of these Internet security risks and provide, for example, runtime monitoring of untrusted code and access control to sensitive resources.

Our work addresses two important security issues in runtime environments. The first issue concerns resource or release control. While many virtual machines provide runtime access control to resources, they do not provide any means of limiting the use of a resource once access is granted; they do not provide so-called resource control. We have addressed the issue of resource control in the example of the Java Virtual Machine. In contrast to others’ work, our solution builds on an enhancement to the existing security architecture. We demonstrate that resource control permissions for Java-mediated resources can be integrated into the regular Java security architecture, thus leading to a clean design and a single external security policy.

The second issue that we address is the usabilityhttps://www.diva-portal.org/liu/webform/form.jsp

DiVA Web Form and security of the setup of security policies for runtime environments. Access control decisions are based on external configuration files, the security policy, which must be set up by the end user. This set-up is security-critical but also complicated and errorprone for a lay end user and supportive, usable tools are so far missing. After one of our usability studies signalled that offline editing of the configuration file is inefficient and difficult for end users, we conducted a usability study of personal firewalls to identify usable ways of setting up a security policy at runtime. An analysis of general user help techniques together with the results from the two previous studies resulted in a proposal of design guidelines for applications that need to set up a security policy. Our guidelines have been used for the design and implementation of the tool JPerM that sets the Java security policy at runtime. JPerM evaluated positively in a usability study and supports the validity of our design guidelines.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institutionen för datavetenskap, 2007
Series
Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations, ISSN 0345-7524 ; 1075
Keywords
Information security, Usability, Java, Resource control, Virtual machine
National Category
Computer Sciences
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-8809 (URN)978-91-85715-65-7 (ISBN)
Public defence
2007-05-29, Visionen, Hus B, Campus Valla, Linköpings universitet, Linköping, 10:15 (English)
Opponent
Supervisors
Available from: 2007-04-27 Created: 2007-04-27 Last updated: 2020-03-24

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Herzog, AlmutShahmehri, Nahid

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