Grupo Alarcos · Conference paper · 2013

Is Usability an Obstacle for Information Systems Security?

Laura Zapata, Ana María Moreno, Eduardo Fernández-Medina Patón

10th International Wokshop on Security in Information Systems (WOSIS 2013) · 2013

Keeping information systems secure is costly. Organizations allocate financial and human resources in order to prevent security incidents having an impact on software applications. There is evidence that information systems security has in some cases been affected by human errors that might be caused by a poor usability design. There is clearly a link between security and usability. To clarify this, we have conducted a systematic mapping study of the literature produced over the last decade. We identified five relationship types: inverse, direct, relative, one-way inverse, and no-relationship. Most authors agree that there is an inverse relationship between security and usability, which means that increasing usability leads to a decrease in security issues in a product and vice versa. However, this is not a unanimous finding, and this study unveils a number of open questions, like application domain dependency and the need to explore lower level relationships between attribute sub-characteristics.