A systematic mapping study of usability vs security

Abstract

Usability and security are two of the inevitable but conflicting quality factors in today’s multi-user modern computing environment. Although usability is considered to be an essential component of a secure system, not many studies focused on these two factors together. This study aimed to determine the general trends regarding the usability and security issues. Therefore, a systematic mapping approach was applied with the articles published on these two issues together between years 2006 and 2016 to reveal the research trends in this research area. 179 papers, which were indexed in web of science, were included for the mapping. The results revealed that many researches dealt with usability and security issues. They reported problems of efficiency and learnability from usability perspective and authentication from security perspective. They mainly adopt usability evaluation methods rather than any specific usability-security specific method and a few proposed recommendations or a method for design or improvement of usable security.