Security and Usability

Chapter Thirty. IBM Lotus Notes/Domino: Embedding Security in Collaborative Applications

Mary Ellen Zurko

THERE ARE A MULTITUDE OF APPROACHES TO MAKING SECURITY USABLE AND USEFUL. Some approaches concentrate on the usability of the security information, mechanisms, and displays themselves. Some approaches concentrate on making as much security as possible disappear into the context of more task-directed functions, from the point of view of as many (types of) users as possible. Under the best circumstances, security and usability, along with performance, are considered and integrated in initial architectural and design discussions. As products evolve and mature, new challenges in these areas arise, and the solutions need to work well with existing, deployed code and data. The breadth of risks, threats, and features often generates a range of solutions that are more or less integrated, depending on context, process, and history.

Usable Secure Collaboration

Collaborative applications offer a particularly rich environment to explore approaches to usable security, as can be seen in several of the vendor chapters in this book. Because they are user-to-user applications, collaborative applications have high profiles and aggressive usability goals. Collaborating on potentially sensitive topics requires both open sharing and tight control, depending on the users, the tasks, and the information being manipulated. Both administrators and end users are involved directly and indirectly in using ...