ABSTRACT Toward Usable Access Control for End-users: A Case Study of Facebook Privacy Settings

Many protection mechanisms in computer security are designed to enforce a configurable policy. The security policy captures high-level goals and intentions, and is managed by a policy author tasked with translating these goals into an implementable policy. In our work, we focus on access control policies where errors in the specified policy can result in the mechanism incorrectly denying a request to access a resource, or incorrectly allowing access to a resource that they should not have access to. Due to the need for correct policies, it is critical that organizations and individuals have usable tools to manage security policies. Policy management encompasses several subtasks including specifying the initial security policy, modifying an existing policy, and comprehending the effective policy. The policy author must understand the configurable options well enough to accurately translate the desired policy into the implemented policy. Specifying correct security policies is known to be a difficult task, and prior work has contributed policy authoring tools that are more usable than the prior art and other work has also shown the importance of the policy author being able to quickly understand the effective policy. Specifying a correct policy is difficult enough for technical users, and now, increasingly, end-users are being asked to make acces