Friday, November 23, 2007

The most annoying security procedures

According to a Swedish survey with 1200 participants, these are the three most annoying security procedures that are enforced at companies:

...change password: 43%
...the USB port is blocked: 42%
...not being able to select password: 41%

I certainly agree with the first one... it is annoying, because it is hard to remember all passwords at different places.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Security Architecture Analysis

When I have been looking for work related to my research I stumbled over this survey from the Australian government: A Survey of Techniques for Security Architecture Analysis. It's quite an interesting survey. Only too bad that it is rather old from 2003. However, It contains a lot of interesting stuff and I have not found any other paper that covers as much work in this field in the same context. The abstract of the survey says (my layout and emphases):

This technical report is a survey of existing techniques which could potentially be used in the analysis of security architectures. The report has been structured to section the analysis process over three phases:
  • the capture of a specific architecture in a suitable representation,
  • discovering attacks on the captured architecture, and
  • then assessing and comparing different security architectures.
Each technique presented in this report has been recognised as being potentially useful for one phase of the analysis. By presenting a set of potentially useful techniques, it is hoped that designers and decisionmakers involved in the development and maintenance of security architectures will be able to develop a more complete, justified and usable methodology other than those currently being used to perform analyses.
Does anybody know of any other work that covers all the three phases above?