Out to Explore the Cybersecurity Planet
This work offers a novel conceptual model for understanding and improving security ceremonies by addressing human behavior, though it is incremental in its theoretical approach.
The paper tackles the persistent failure of security ceremonies by proposing a metaphorical framework of four cities on a 'Cybersecurity planet' to analyze how different approaches address human factors, and suggests applying these insights to improve real-world ceremonies like WhatsApp login and flight boarding.
Security ceremonies still fail despite decades of efforts by researchers and practitioners. Attacks are often a cunning amalgam of exploits for technical systems and of forms of human behaviour. For example, this is the case with the recent news headline of a large-scale attack against Electrum Bitcoin wallets, which manages to spread a malicious update of the wallet app. I therefore set out to look at things through a different lens. I make the (metaphorical) hypothesis that human ancestors arrived on Earth along with security ceremonies from a very far planet, the Cybersecurity planet. My hypothesis continues, in that studying (by huge telescopes) the surface of Cybersecurity in combination with the logical projection on that surface of what happens on Earth is beneficial for us earthlings. I have spotted four cities so far on the remote planet. Democratic City features security ceremonies that allow inhabitants to follow personal paths of practice and, for example, make errors or be driven by emotions. By contrast, security ceremonies in Dictatorial City compel inhabitants to comply, thus behaving like programmed automata. Security ceremonies in Beautiful City are so beautiful that inhabitants just love to follow them precisely. Invisible City has security ceremonies that are not perceivable, hence inhabitants feel like they never encounter any. Incidentally, we use the words "democratic" and "dictatorial" without any political connotation. A key argument I shall develop is that all cities but Democratic City address the human factor, albeit in different ways. In the light of these findings, I will also discuss security ceremonies of our planet, such as WhatsApp web login and flight boarding, and explore room for improving them based upon the current understanding of Cybersecurity.