Costs and benefits of authentication advice
This work addresses the issue of unclear security guidance for users and organizations, though it appears incremental by building on current work.
The paper tackles the problem of ambiguous and contradictory authentication security advice by defining a formal approach to identify its costs and benefits, resulting in a framework that analyzes these factors for all classes of security advice.
Authentication security advice is given with the goal of guiding users and organisations towards secure actions and practices. In this paper, we demonstrate that security advice can be ambiguous, contradictory and at times may not even have any clear benefits. We expand on current work by defining a formal approach to identifying costs of security advice and instigate a user study to identify the costs that apply to a large range of authentication advice. We also apply a simple framework for analysing the authentication related security benefits of advice. This allows us to identify costs and benefits for all classes of security advice.