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extended-abstract

Towards improving mental models of personal firewall users

Published: 04 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Windows Vista's personal firewall provides its diverse users with a basic interface that hides many operational details. However, our study of this interface revealed that concealing the impact of network context on the security state of the firewall results in mental models that are unclear about the protection provided by the firewall resulting in an inaccurate understanding of the firewall configuration. We developed a prototype to support more contextually complete mental models through inclusion of network context information. Results from our initial evaluation of the prototype support our approach of improving user understanding of underlying system states by revealing hidden context, while considering the tension between complexity of the interface and security of the system.

References

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Chen, G. and Kotz, D. A survey of context-aware mobile computing research. TR2000-381, Dartmouth College (2000).
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Chiasson, S., van Oorschot, P. C., and Biddle, R. Even experts deserve usable security: Design guidelines for security management systems. In USM 2007, 4 pages.
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Cranor, F. L. A framework for reasoning about the human in the loop. In UPSEC '08 (2008).
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De Paula, R., Ding, X., Dourish, P., Nies, K., Pillet, B., Redmiles, D., Ren, J., Rode, J., and Filho, R. S. Two experiences designing for effective security. In SOUPS '05 (2005), 25--34.
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Edwards, W. K., Shehan, E., Stoll, J. Security Automation Considered Harmful? In NSPW '07 (2007).
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Maxion, R. A. and Reeder, R. W. Improving user interface dependability through mitigation of human error. Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud. 63, 1--2 (2005), 25--50.
[7]
Rode, J., Johansson, C., DiGioia, P., Filho, S., Nies, K., Nguyen, D. H., Ren, J., Dourish, P., and Redmiles, D. Seeing further: extending visualization as a basis for usable security. In SOUPS '06 (2006), 145--155.
[8]
Smith, S. Humans in the loop: human-computer interaction and security. Security & Privacy, IEEE, 1, 3 (2003), 75--79.
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Windows Vista Help: Choosing a network location.
[10]
Yee, K. P. Aligning security and usability. Security & Privacy, IEEE, 2, 5 (2004), 48--55.

Cited By

View all
  • (2017)Systematic Literature Review on Usability of Firewall ConfigurationACM Computing Surveys10.1145/313087650:6(1-35)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2017
  • (2012)Privacy-aware shared UI toolkit for nomadic environmentsSoftware—Practice & Experience10.1002/spe.108542:5(601-628)Online publication date: 1-May-2012
  • (2009)Usability meets access controlProceedings of the 14th ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies10.1145/1542207.1542220(73-74)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2009

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '09: CHI '09 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2009
2470 pages
ISBN:9781605582474
DOI:10.1145/1520340
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 April 2009

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Author Tags

  1. configuration
  2. firewall
  3. mental model
  4. usable security

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  • Extended-abstract

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CHI '09
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CHI EA '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 385 of 1,130 submissions, 34%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2017)Systematic Literature Review on Usability of Firewall ConfigurationACM Computing Surveys10.1145/313087650:6(1-35)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2017
  • (2012)Privacy-aware shared UI toolkit for nomadic environmentsSoftware—Practice & Experience10.1002/spe.108542:5(601-628)Online publication date: 1-May-2012
  • (2009)Usability meets access controlProceedings of the 14th ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies10.1145/1542207.1542220(73-74)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2009

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