Studying access-control usability in the lab
Kami E. Vaniea, Lujo Bauer, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Michael K. Reiter · 2012
In a series of studies, we investigated a user interface intended to help users stay aware of their access-control policy even when they are engaged in another activity as their primary task. Methodological issues arose in each study, which impacted the results. We describe the difficulties encountered during each study, and changes to the methodology designed to overcome those difficulties. Through this process, we shed light on the challenges intrinsic to many studies that examine security as a secondary task, and convey a series of lessons that we hope will help other researchers avoid some of the difficulties that we encountered.