Aligning Security, Usability, User Experience: A Pattern Approach

Security and usability have evolved independently, therefore, expertise in both of these domains are hard to find in one person. This research aims to assist security and usability designers and developers by influencing their decision-making abilities when it comes to the conflicts between security and usability. It does so by proposing the use of usable security patterns for assisting the developers and designers in making accurate choices when handling the conflicts. A novel methodology is presented for identifying usable security patterns from existing implementations, which are effectively managing the security and usability trade-offs. The aim is to identify such implementations while documenting the suitable trade-offs in the format of patterns for use by other developers and designers. To instantiate the methodology, a case study was conducted whose results are also presented in the paper.