SS 2022 - Master - Lab - Usable Security and Privacy

Nowadays, not only IT experts but everyone has to deal with security mechanisms of applications and infrastructure. However, IT security is one of the most complex topics users have to deal with. Whilst, in theory, common established security mechanisms are sufficiently secure, in practice, they usually do not meet the requirements.

Usability plays a central role in this. It should simple and just work. This requirement bears some interesting challenges to find the perfect balance between security goals and the users’ cognitive skills.

Usable Security deals with concepts of interactive security mechanisms and the evaluation of these regarding their application by specific user groups. It aims to secure the interaction with the user, which traditionally is seen as the weakest link of the security chain. Usually, users are told to adapt and are trained to deal with the complex mechanisms, which is an out-dated approach. Instead, research on Usable Security and especially Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) combines ideas from computer science, design and psychology, such as visualization and sociology, to find new and better approaches for a user-friendly and intuitive interface between humans and computers.

Finding a topic

In this lab you can learn and apply the basic concepts of Usable Security and Privacy. You can re-evaluate existing techniques, improve them or come up with your own ones.

We propose the topics listed on the left. When you decided on a topic, please send us an expose. For that, you can use the LaTeX template here