Safe and Sound: a safety-critical approach to security

This paper firstly argues that the design of security applications needs to consider more than technical elements. Since almost all security systems involve human users as well as technology, security should be considered, and designed as, a socio-technical work system. Secondly, we argue that safety-critical systems design has similar goals and issues to security design, and should thus provide a good starting point. Thirdly, we identify Reason's (1990) Generic Error Modeling System as the most suitable starting point for a socio-technical approach, and demonstrate how its basic elements can be applied to the domain of information security. We demonstrate how the application of the model's concepts, especially the distinction between active and latent failures, offers an effective way of identifying and addressing security issues that involve human behavior. Finally, we identify strengths and weaknesses of this approach, and the requirement for further work to produce a security-specific sociotechnical design framework