Secure system? Challenge accepted: finding and resolving security failures using security premortems.

Faily, Shamal; Parkin, Simon; Lyle, John

Abstract

Risk-driven approaches are dominant in secure systems design; these aim to elicit and treat vulnerabilities and the threats exploiting them. Such approaches, however, are so focused on driving risks out of system design, they fail to recognise the usefulness of failure as a vehicle for security innovation. To explore the role of failure as a design tool, we present the security premortem: a participative design technique where participants assume that a system has been exploited, and plausible reasons are given for explaining why. We describe this approach and illustrate how software tools can be used to support it.

Citation

FAILY, S., PARKIN, S. and LYLE, J. 2012. Secure system? Challenge accepted: finding and resolving security failures using security premortems. In Faily, S., Fléchais, I. and Coles-Kemp, L. (eds.) Proceedings of the Designing interactive secure systems workshop (DISS 2012), part of the 26th International BCS human computer interaction conference (HCI 2012): people and computers, 11 September 2012, Birmingham, UK. Swindon: BCS [online], article number 66. Available from: https://doi.org/10.14236/ewic/HCI2012.66

• Conference Name: Designing interactive secure systems workshop (DISS 2012), part of the 26th International BCS human computer interaction conference (HCI 2012): people and computers
• Conference Location: Birmingham, UK
• Start Date: Sep 11, 2012
• Acceptance Date: Sep 11, 2012
• Online Publication Date: Sep 30, 2012
• Publication Date: Sep 30, 2012
• Deposit Date: Dec 10, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 10, 2021
• Publisher: BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT
• Series Title: Electronic workshops in computing
• Series ISSN: 1477-9358
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.14236/ewic/HCI2012.66
• Keywords: Systems security; Security risk analysis; Computer-aided integration of requirements and information security (CAIRIS); Software engineering
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/1446694
• Related Public URLs: (Full proceedings) https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/1446739