Human interaction is an integral part of any system. Users have daily interactions with a system and make many decisions that affect the overall state of security. The fallibility of users has been shown but there is little research focused on the fundamental principles to optimize the usability of security mechanisms. We plan to develop a framework to design, develop and evaluate user interaction in a security context. We will (a) examine current security mechanisms and develop basic principles which can influence security interface design; (b) introduce new paradigms for security interfaces that utilize those principles; (c) design new human-centric security mechanisms for several problem areas to illustrate the paradigms; and (d) conduct repeatable human subject experiments to evaluate and refine the principles and paradigms developed in this research.

TEAM

PIs: Ting Yu, Ninghui Li (Purdue), Robert Proctor (Purdue)
Student: Zach Jorgensen