Usable Security and Privacy

Overview

The course will cover the topic of human factors of computer security and privacy. Humans are a vital component of security and privacy systems, they are also one of the most expensive components and the most challenging to reason about. In this course, students will learn about how to create systems that are usable while still fulfilling their primary security or privacy mission. Students will also learn about research topics such as designing user studies to critically evaluate interfaces and reading academic papers to create an academically-informed view of a topic.

Anticipated topics include:

• Study design
• Privacy
• Warning design
• Phishing
• Authentication mechanisms
• Public/Private key management and email security
• Device pairing
• Data usage and privacy policies
• Mobile Security and privacy including location and permissions
• Usability for developers and system administrators

Credits

10

Lecture times

Wednesday 12:10-13:00 in G.3, BAYES

Friday 12:10-13:00 in G.01, Lister

Learn

Learn page which includes videos of the lectures.

Lecturer: Dr. Kami Vaniea
To contact: kvaniea at inf.ed.ac.uk (replace at with @)
Office: IF 5.23
Phone: 502870

Prerequisites

Students are expected to have previously taken a Human-Computer Interaction course OR a Computer Security course. The lecturer will be providing supplementary videos on both topics which cover the subset of HCI and Computer Security material needed to understand the course. The course workload anticipates that students will only have to watch the subset of videos they have not seen previously and that most students will have only taken HCI or CS before, but not both.

Content

This is a new course and content is still being created. To get a sense of the style of this type of course please see a prior course by this lecturer on Today's Privacy Challenges.

Schedule