Multi-level Fuzzy system for usable-security assessment

Indubitably, security is an integral aspect of the development of quality software. More importantly, usability is also an elemental and pivotal factor for developing quality software. In fact, it has been noticed that most of the practitioners are trying to develop a highly secure design while maintaining high usability. Unfortunately, the highly secure design of software becomes worthless because the usability of software is very low. Further, usable security is in more demand due to the increasing usage of computers with enhanced usability and need of security in it too. When improving the usability with security of software, underlying security and usability attributes play an important role. For this reason, usable security assessment employs security and usability attributes to achieve the desired security solutions with usability. Different consecutive versions of two software have been taken in this work to assess usable security. Authors are using Fuzzy-AHP methodology to assess the priorities and overall usable security. In addition, the impact of the security on usability and impact of the usability on security have been evaluated quantitatively. The results obtained and conclusions are useful for practitioners to improve usable-security of software.(c) 2019 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

In software development, both security and usability are important factors to consider. Usable security assessment can achieve the desired security solutions by adjusting security and usability attributes.