Accessible Cyber Security: The Next Frontier?

Abstract

Researchers became aware of the need to pay attention to the usability of cyber security towards the end of the 20th century. This need is widely embraced now, by both academia and industry, as it has become clear that users are a very important link in the security perimeter of organisations. Two decades later, I will make the case for the inclusion and importance of a third dimension of human-centred security, that of accessibility. I will argue that technical measures, usability and accessibility should be equally important considerations during the design of security systems. Unless we do this, we risk ignoring the needs of vast swathes of the population with a range of disabilities. For many of these, security measures are often exasperatingly inaccessible. This talk is a call to action to the community of human-centred security researchers, all of whom have already made huge strides in improving the usability of security mechanisms.