The secret lives of assumptions: developing and refining assumption personas for secure system design.

Faily, Shamal; Fl�chais, Ivan

Abstract

Personas are useful for obtaining an empirically grounded understanding of a secure system's user population, its contexts of use, and possible vulnerabilities and threats endangering it. Often, however, personas need to be partly derived from assumptions; these may be embedded in a variety of different representations. Assumption Personas have been proposed as boundary objects for articulating assumptions about a user population, but no methods or tools currently exist for developing and refining these within the context of secure and usable design. This paper presents an approach for developing and refining assumption personas before and during the design of secure systems. We present a model for structuring the contribution of assumptions to assumption personas, together with a process for developing assumption personas founded on this model. We also present some preliminary results based on an application of this approach in a recent case study.

Citation

FAILY, S. and FLÉCHAIS, I. 2010. The secret lives of assumptions: developing and refining assumption personas for secure system design. In Bernhaupt, R., Forbrig, P., Gulliksen, J. and Lárusdóttir, M. (eds.) Human-centred software engineering: proceedings of the 3rd International conference on human-centred software engineering (HCSE 2010), 14-15 October 2010, Reykjavik, Iceland. Lecture notes in computer science, 6409. Berlin: Springer [online], pages 111-118. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16488-0_9

• Conference Name: 3rd International conference on human-centred software engineering (HCSE 2010)
• Conference Location: Reykjavik, Iceland
• Start Date: Oct 14, 2010
• End Date: Oct 15, 2010
• Acceptance Date: Sep 1, 2010
• Online Publication Date: Dec 31, 2010
• Publication Date: Dec 31, 2010
• Deposit Date: Dec 14, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 14, 2021
• Publisher: Springer
• Pages: 111-118
• Series Title: Lecture notes in computer science (LNCS)
• Series Number: 6409
• Series ISSN: 0302-9743 ; 1611-3349
• ISBN: 9783642164873
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16488-0_9
• Keywords: User personas; User behaviour; Systems security; Security risk analysis; Software engineering
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/1427793