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‘ R‐What? ’ Development of a role‐based access control policy‐writing tool for e‐Scientists
Author(s) -
Brostoff Sacha,
Sasse M. Angela,
Chadwick David,
Cunningham James,
Mbanaso Uche,
Otenko Sassa
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.691
Subject(s) - access control , authorization , computer science , usability , security policy , control (management) , interface (matter) , world wide web , human–computer interaction , computer security , artificial intelligence , bubble , maximum bubble pressure method , parallel computing
A lightweight role‐based access control policy authoring tool was developed for e‐Scientists, a community for which access policies have to be implemented for an increasingly heterogeneous group of local and remote users. Two fundamental problems were identified: (1) lack of understanding of what the policy components are (i.e. how authorization policies are structured), and (2) lack of understanding of the underlying policy paradigm (i.e. what should go into the policy, and what should be left out). Conceptual design (CD) techniques were used to revise the user interface (UI) labels so that e‐Scientists and developers were better able to describe access policy components from labels, and match labels with components ( t = 6.28, df = 7, p = 0.000 two‐tailed). CD, instructional text, bubble help, UI behaviour and alert boxes were used to shape users' models of the policy paradigm. The final prototype improved users' efficiency and effectiveness by more than doubling the speed with which expert users could write authorization policies, and facilitating users without specialist security knowledge to overcome the policy paradigm and components problems, enabling them to complete 80% of basic and 75% of advanced authorization policy‐writing tasks in a usability trial. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.