Barry is not the weakest link: Eliciting secure system requirements with personas

Abstract

Building secure and usable systems means specifying systems for the people using it and the tasks they carry out, rather than vice-versa. User-Centered design approaches encourage an early focus on users and their contexts of use, but these need to be integrated with approaches for engineering secure systems. This paper describes how personas can augment a process for eliciting and specifying requirements for secure and usable systems. Our results suggest that personas increase stakeholder empathy towards users represented by personas, and the empirical data used to build personas can also be used to obtain a better understanding of prospective attackers and their motivations.