Studying IT Security Professionals: Research Design and Lessons Learned
The HOT Admin Field Study used qualitative methods to study information technology security administrators. Both the nature of the field and the difficulty of gaining access to subjects had...
View ArticleOn the Imbalance of the Security Problem Space and its Expected Consequences
This paper considers the attacker-defender game in the field of computer security as a three-dimensional phenomenon. The decomposition of the problem space into technological, human, and social factors...
View ArticleCooperative Secondary Authorization Recycling
As distributed applications such as Grid and enterprise systems scale up and become increasingly complex, their authorization infrastructures—based predominantly on the request-response paradigm—are...
View ArticleSupport for ANSI RBAC in CORBA
We describe access control mechanisms of the Common Ob ject Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and define a configuration of the CORBA protection system in more precise and less ambiguous language...
View ArticleTowards Understanding IT Security Professionals and Their Tools
We report preliminary results of our ongoing field study of IT professionals who are involved in security management. We interviewed a dozen practitioners from five organizations to understand their...
View ArticleUnderstanding IT Security Administration through a Field Study
The security administration of large organizations is exceptionally challenging due to the increasingly large numbers of application instances, resources, and users; the growing complexity and dynamics...
View ArticleDetecting, Analyzing and Responding to Security Incidents: A Qualitative...
This study develops categories of responses to security incidents, based on a grounded theory analysis of interviews with security practitioners, with a focus on the tasks performed during security...
View ArticleTowards Understanding IT Security Professionals and Their Tools
It is estimated that organizations worldwide will spend around $100 Billion USD on IT Security in 2007. A notable size of this will be spent on tools but little is known how effective IT security...
View ArticleA Study of Security Administration Errors
Security administrators prevent security breaches against their infrastructure by using their tools to implement the security policy. This paper deals with security administration errors that were...
View ArticleProceedings of the Second EECE 512 Mini-Conference on Computer Security
The proceedings of the second mini-conference of the EECE 512 course on Topics in Computer Security include four papers: 1. "Controlling Access to Resources Within The Python Interpreter" by Brett...
View ArticleCooperative Secondary Authorization Recycling
As distributed applications such as Grid and enterprise systems scale up and become increasingly complex, their authorization infrastructures—based predominantly on the request-response paradigm—are...
View ArticleOn the Imbalance of the Security Problem Space and its Expected Consequences
This paper considers the attacker-defender game in the field of computer security as a three-dimensional phenomenon. The decomposition of the problem space into technological, human, and social factors...
View ArticleSearching for the Right Fit: A Case Study of IT Security Management Model...
The usability of security systems within an organization is impacted not only by tool interfaces but also by the security management model (SMM) of the IT security team. Finding the right SMM is...
View ArticleHuman, Organizational and Technological Factors of IT Security
Given that Information Technology (IT) has become pervasive in today’s organizations, properly securing systems is critical. However, many challenges remain with respect to implementing sound...
View ArticleHuman, Organizational, and Technological Factors of IT Security
This paper describes the HOT Admin research project, which is investigating the human, organizational, and technological factors of IT security from the perspective of security practitioners. We use...
View ArticleSearching for the Right Fit: Considerations when Balancing IT Security...
The effectiveness of IT security professionals in an organization is influenced not only by the usability of security management tools, but also by the fit of an organization's security management...
View ArticleSecurity Practitioners in Context: Their Activities and Interactions
This study develops the context of interactions of IT security practitioners. Preliminary qualitative analysis of 22 interviews (to date) and participatory observation has identified eight different...
View ArticleSecurity Practitioners in Context: Their Activities and Collaborative...
This study develops the context of interactions of IT security practitioners. Preliminary qualitative analysis of 22 interviews (to date) and participatory observation has identified eight different...
View ArticleA Two-Factor Authentication System using Mobile Phones
The use of untrusted computers to access critical information introduces one of the main challenges in protecting the security of users’ confidential information. Providing an easy method of accessing...
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