Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Researching and developing usability and security auditing practices. How do we measure the two in a single assessment?

You don't. They're wildly different disciplines. Security auditing is fundamentally a systems programming problem. The least effective security "auditors" approach security as something different than software engineering. The most significant security issues arise from correctness issues; finding and fleshing them out involves discovering the degrees of freedom offered to an attacker by faulty assumptions made by blocks of code scattered throughout an entire system.

That's not to take anything away from the practice this team is trying to start! Someone should be doing security usability work, because I don't know anyone who does it well now.

Providing real software security for open source projects is a tricky problem. Talented software security people are in enormous demand. Bill rates are going up. One thing a project like this might want to tackle is onboarding more technical people into the discipline, to address the supply problem.

I'm not so sure. "User uses the system as designed" is a huge faulty assumption -- look at all the people who put SSH private keys (or Amazon AWS keys) on GitHub or who write a shared company-wide password on a sticky note taped to their monitor. A more usable system might prevent these sorts of failure modes, or at least inform the user of the risks that result from such decisions.

I'm probably being imprecise. There's a big and important discipline of assessing the usability of a system and the impact of all the affordances the interface of a system provides. I believe that also takes a special skillset, and it's a skillset I'm happy to see new initiatives like this taking on.

I am not suggesting that security usability (or, to keep it technical, security UX) is easy, or that software security practices are necessarily good at it.

I agree that these are separate disciplines, but I think that one reason we're not seeing anyone who does security usability work well right now is that that the best practitioners in each field tend to be silo'd by their specialization.

A single assessment is not necessarily a single metric, and an assessment comprised of audits in each domain seems like a good first step toward building understanding of a common goal and measuring progress toward it. Putting these audits together will hopefully start to expose not only the tradeoffs, but also the synergies at play in designing secure systems.

It seems to me that at the root of the security usability problem is a failure in collaboration between developers with solid software engineering practices and designers with solid UX design practices. Talent on both sides is in high demand, but there are few organizations that are able to get both working together effectively on these hard problems.

>Talent on both sides is in high demand, but there are few organizations that are able to get both working together effectively on these hard problems.

Somehow Duo Security[1] has managed to do this phenomenally well. Their product is both a UX wonder and a security marvel. My first thought was "This doesn't feel like a security product. This feels like a solid UX design demo." But looking at their open source code, it's some of the more beautifully designed security software I've seen. I wonder what their secret is-- and if they'd be willing to share.

[1] https://www.duosecurity.com/

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