Seeking the philosopher's stone.

This article describes the unique challenges facing usable security research and design, and introduces three proposals for addressing these. For all intents and purposes, security design is currently a craft, where quality is dependent on individuals and their ability, rather than on principles and engineering. However, the wide variety of different skills necessary to design secure and usable systems is unlikely to be mastered by many individuals, requiring an unlikely combination of insight and education. Psychology, economics and cryptography have very little in common, and yet all have a role to play in the field of usable security. To address these concerns, three proposals are presented here: 1) to adopt a principled design framework for usable security and privacy; 2) to support a research environment where skills and knowledge can be pooled and shared; and 3) to guide and inform the principles that underpin the educational curriculum of future security engineers and researchers