Skip to main content

Improving Usability AND Security - it is possible?

I believe so, but only if security teams start to listen to what's important to the usability experts and adapt the security provision accordingly. As many have said before, there is no such thing as 100% security and we don't even necessarily want governmental levels of security for everything. Security provision should be appropriate to the systems and the information it protects.

I have worked on several projects with user experience designers and it has really changed my approach to securing systems. One particular project I was brought in to work on was having problems because the UX team were refusing to put in additional security measures and the security team were refusing to let them go live. To cut a long story short, it turns out that there are known drop-out rates for registrations or user journeys based on the number of fields people have to fill in and how many clicks they have to do. So, the requirements from the security team meant that the drop-out rates would be so high the service wasn't going to work. How can you deliver a secure service in this instance? Well we split the registration journey and allowed the first transaction with lighter weight security information. This won't work in all cases, but the idea is the same - what security is appropriate for this system?

The key here is to understand the user journey. Once you understand this, you can categorise the individual journeys and the information used. Not all journeys will access the same level of information and not all information has the same sensitivity. Authentication should be appropriate to the journey and information. Don't make the user enter loads of authentication information all the time or to do the most simple task. Some user journeys won't actually need authentication at all. For those that do, you should consider step-up authentication - that is simple authentication to begin with, but as the user starts to access more sensitive information or make changes/transactions that are high risk, ask them for additional credentials. For example, a simple username and password could be used for the majority of user journeys, but perhaps a one-time token for more high-risk journeys.

It is possible to have both usability and security. In order for this to work though, you have to:
  • understand the user journeys
  • ensure that it is usable most of the time for most tasks
  • categorise the information and set appropriate access levels
  • use step-up authentication for high-risk tasks rather than make the whole service hard to use
  • use risk engines transparently in the background to force step-up authentication or decline transactions/tasks when risk is above the acceptable threshold

Comments

Popular Posts

Coventry Building Society Grid Card

Coventry Building Society have recently introduced the Grid Card as a simple form of 2-factor authentication. It replaces memorable words in the login process. Now the idea is that you require something you know (i.e. your password) and something you have (i.e. the Grid Card) to log in - 2 things = 2 factors. For more about authentication see this post . How does it work? Very simply is the answer. During the log in process, you will be asked to enter the digits at 3 co-ordinates. For example: c3, d2 and j5 would mean that you enter 5, 6 and 3 (this is the example Coventry give). Is this better than a secret word? Yes, is the short answer. How many people will choose a memorable word that someone close to them could guess? Remember, that this isn't a password as such, it is expected to be a word and a word that means something to the user. The problem is that users cannot remember lots of passwords, so remembering two would be difficult. Also, having two passwords isn't real

How Reliable is RAID?

We all know that when we want a highly available and reliable server we install a RAID solution, but how reliable actually is that? Well, obviously, you can work it out quite simply as we will see below, but before you do, you have to know what sort of RAID are you talking about, as some can be less reliable than a single disk. The most common types are RAID 0, 1 and 5. We will look at the reliability of each using real disks for the calculations, but before we do, let's recap on what the most common RAID types are. Common Types of RAID RAID 0 is the Stripe set, which consists of 2 or more disks with data written in equal sized blocks to each of the disks. This is a fast way of reading and writing data to disk, but it gives you no redundancy at all. In fact, RAID 0 is actually less reliable than a single disk, as all the disks are in series from a reliability point of view. If you lose one disk in the array, you've lost the whole thing. RAID 0 is used purely to speed up dis

Trusteer or no trust 'ere...

...that is the question. Well, I've had more of a look into Trusteer's Rapport, and it seems that my fears were justified. There are many security professionals out there who are claiming that this is 'snake oil' - marketing hype for something that isn't possible. Trusteer's Rapport gives security 'guaranteed' even if your machine is infected with malware according to their marketing department. Now any security professional worth his salt will tell you that this is rubbish and you should run a mile from claims like this. Anyway, I will try to address a few questions I raised in my last post about this. Firstly, I was correct in my assumption that Rapport requires a list of the servers that you wish to communicate with; it contacts a secure DNS server, which has a list already in it. This is how it switches from a phishing site to the legitimate site silently in the background. I have yet to fully investigate the security of this DNS, however, as most