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> Security and ease of use are always a tradeoff. Security and ease of use are not by default mutually exclusive. Depending on circumstances satisfying both ma

> Security and ease of use are always a tradeoff. Security and ease of use are not by default mutually exclusive. Depending on circumstances satisfying both may be a challenge, but it’s not a blanket impossibility and we could probably hold certain companies up to a standard that corresponds to their multi-billion valuations. A virtual “slider” on which you can only dial up security by hurting usability is only a useful map, not the territory.

jedberg 6y ago
> It’s worth keeping in mind that even though security and ease of use tend to inversely correlate with each other, they are not by default mutually exclusive. I actually disagree with you. I think security and ease of use are mutually exclusive. I can't think of a single counterexample where security did not have an effect on usability. Now to be clear, I absolutely believe we should have a lot more security than we do, and we should be giving up usability to do it. But I think that it is necessary to give up usability.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  I believe that the degree to which security negatively affects usability is variable, and in some cases could be negligible, depending on engineering and product teams’ competence. (Edit: remove many words)
- saalweachter 6y ago
  I think security and usability are tradeoffs ... past a certain point. I have a hard time believing most products couldn't improve both substantially before needing to start considering the trade-offs.
- ianstormtaylor 6y ago
  It's not hard to think of examples... 1. HTTPS everywhere has zero impact on the usability of a website, but makes visiting those sites much more secure. 2. Apple's App Store model for installing applications improves security and is also easier to use for the average user. 3. 1Password with Touch/Face ID can actually be easier these days than entering emails and passwords manually. 4. And more… Security doesn't always have an immediate effect on usability, and even when it does it isn't always negative.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    > 1. HTTPS everywhere has zero impact on the usability of a website, but makes visiting those sites much more secure. You have to install a plugin on every browser and device. That's not user friendly. Also some sites break and you have to understand why. > 2. Apple's App Store model for installing applications improves security and is also easier to use for the average user. You have to have an account on the app store. You can't log into the same account on more than five machines. You have to put your password in every time you install an app. That's all a lot harder than clicking on a link in an email. > 3. 1Password with Touch/Face ID can actually be easier these days than entering emails and passwords manually. You have to install 1password on all your devices. You have to mange your passwords with 1password. I'm an expert and even I have a hard time getting it to catch every update and every password field. 1password is a usability nightmare. Having the same password everywhere is a lot easier (and obviously less secure). You're looking at one aspect after the initial setup and ignoring maintenance.
    - pvg 6y ago
      It's not really much of a comparison if you pick things like 'the security mechanism breaks in some way' and no similar failure modes of the 'no security' variant. It's a serious usability problem if an insecure interaction gives you bogus information or if all your accounts are compromised because you use the same password everywhere.
      - jedberg 6y ago
        But that’s the point. Security introduces new failure modes that make usability worse. Again I’m not saying it’s bad, quite the opposite. I’m just saying we have to acknowledge it’s always a trade off.
        pvg 6y ago
        If that's the point it seems like a particularly inaccurate and cherry-picky one. Security is not what's introducing the failure modes, the adversarial universe is. The no-security solutions have catastrophically worse usability in that reality. You're comparing the usability of things with security features with the usability of things without security in a hypothetical non-adversarial environment. I can posit a world in which security features never fail or introduce usability friction, that wouldn't be a useful starting point for a comparison either.
- foresto 6y ago
  > I think security and ease of use are mutually exclusive. > I can't think of a single counterexample where security did not have an effect on usability. Sticking with the "mutually exclusive" criterion, wouldn't ssh vs. rsh serve as a counterexample? How about https vs. http? Both replacements brought us greatly improved security, with no effect on usability in the vast majority of time I've spent with them.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    > https vs. http Https is worse from a usability standpoint because of the need for trust stores and keeping them up to date. While it's mostly taken care of by the browser, it can still cause problems when you don't have anything in your truststore that can verify the other certificate. Ssh vs rsh suffers a similar problem. If the certificate on the other side changes, you have to update your local config to allow the new certificate and will either be blocked or have warnings until you do so. Pretty much with anything that requires certificates, usability is worse because you have to maintain the trust store in some way. In both cases you mentioned the effects are very negligible and certainly worth the tradeoff, but strictly speaking, the usability is worse.
- kragen 6y ago
  You've posted this error here before, but there's an enormous amount of research demonstrating its falsehood. SOUPS is now in its 16th year (https://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/ https://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/ has an overview of previous years) and has featured speakers and organizers including Ian Goldberg, Bill Cheswick, Ross Anderson, Adam Shostack, Ed Felten, Daniel Vogel, Chris Soghoian, Adrienne Porter Felt, David Wagner, Mary Ellen Zurko, Ben Laurie, and Lorrie Cranor. If you know anything about security and HCI, you know these people know a lot more than you do about them; they've been leading innovators in both fields for decades. Some of them have been publishing ways to reconcile usability and security since the mid-90s. And they unanimously agree that you're full of shit. In view of the state of research in the field, your statement is at the level of global-warming denialism or homeopathy, if not flat-earthism.
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't make your arguments this way on HN. It poisons the community and evokes worse from others. Worst of all, if you're right, i.e. if you're in possession of some truth that others don't know, you end up discrediting the truth by mixing it in with personal attacks, calling names, or other aggressiveness. That phenomenon gets stronger the less-known the truth is, because people will more readily look for reasons to reject a contrarian/minority view than a familiar one. It's important not to supply spurious such reasons, and that means articulating the truth (or what you believe is true) in a way that avoids gratuitous admixtures. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20truth%20discredit&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - kragen 6y ago
      Your policy isn't working. It's letting open-and-shut misinformation like this, the outright denial of the existence of a well-known field of research going back decades, go unchallenged. That's Creationism-level intellectual malpractice. You may succeed in making HN more polite — or, more likely, rude in a more subtle way, like Winston Churchill — but if you do it by reducing it to an echo chamber of vulgar misconceptions like this, is that really a win? How can you improve the epistemic functioning of the community? I'm going to take a break for 81 days now, unless I need to respond to something specifically about something I've written. We'll see what this place looks like then. I'll probably follow it with a longer break.
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jedberg 6y ago

> It’s worth keeping in mind that even though security and ease of use tend to inversely correlate with each other, they are not by default mutually exclusive. I actually disagree with you. I think security and ease of use are mutually exclusive. I can't think of a single counterexample where security did not have an effect on usability. Now to be clear, I absolutely believe we should have a lot more security than we do, and we should be giving up usability to do it. But I think that it is necessary to give up usability.

strogonoff 6y ago
I believe that the degree to which security negatively affects usability is variable, and in some cases could be negligible, depending on engineering and product teams’ competence. (Edit: remove many words)
saalweachter 6y ago
I think security and usability are tradeoffs ... past a certain point. I have a hard time believing most products couldn't improve both substantially before needing to start considering the trade-offs.
ianstormtaylor 6y ago
It's not hard to think of examples... 1. HTTPS everywhere has zero impact on the usability of a website, but makes visiting those sites much more secure. 2. Apple's App Store model for installing applications improves security and is also easier to use for the average user. 3. 1Password with Touch/Face ID can actually be easier these days than entering emails and passwords manually. 4. And more… Security doesn't always have an immediate effect on usability, and even when it does it isn't always negative.
- jedberg 6y ago
  > 1. HTTPS everywhere has zero impact on the usability of a website, but makes visiting those sites much more secure. You have to install a plugin on every browser and device. That's not user friendly. Also some sites break and you have to understand why. > 2. Apple's App Store model for installing applications improves security and is also easier to use for the average user. You have to have an account on the app store. You can't log into the same account on more than five machines. You have to put your password in every time you install an app. That's all a lot harder than clicking on a link in an email. > 3. 1Password with Touch/Face ID can actually be easier these days than entering emails and passwords manually. You have to install 1password on all your devices. You have to mange your passwords with 1password. I'm an expert and even I have a hard time getting it to catch every update and every password field. 1password is a usability nightmare. Having the same password everywhere is a lot easier (and obviously less secure). You're looking at one aspect after the initial setup and ignoring maintenance.
  - pvg 6y ago
    It's not really much of a comparison if you pick things like 'the security mechanism breaks in some way' and no similar failure modes of the 'no security' variant. It's a serious usability problem if an insecure interaction gives you bogus information or if all your accounts are compromised because you use the same password everywhere.
    - jedberg 6y ago
      But that’s the point. Security introduces new failure modes that make usability worse. Again I’m not saying it’s bad, quite the opposite. I’m just saying we have to acknowledge it’s always a trade off.
      - pvg 6y ago
        If that's the point it seems like a particularly inaccurate and cherry-picky one. Security is not what's introducing the failure modes, the adversarial universe is. The no-security solutions have catastrophically worse usability in that reality. You're comparing the usability of things with security features with the usability of things without security in a hypothetical non-adversarial environment. I can posit a world in which security features never fail or introduce usability friction, that wouldn't be a useful starting point for a comparison either.
foresto 6y ago
> I think security and ease of use are mutually exclusive. > I can't think of a single counterexample where security did not have an effect on usability. Sticking with the "mutually exclusive" criterion, wouldn't ssh vs. rsh serve as a counterexample? How about https vs. http? Both replacements brought us greatly improved security, with no effect on usability in the vast majority of time I've spent with them.
- jedberg 6y ago
  > https vs. http Https is worse from a usability standpoint because of the need for trust stores and keeping them up to date. While it's mostly taken care of by the browser, it can still cause problems when you don't have anything in your truststore that can verify the other certificate. Ssh vs rsh suffers a similar problem. If the certificate on the other side changes, you have to update your local config to allow the new certificate and will either be blocked or have warnings until you do so. Pretty much with anything that requires certificates, usability is worse because you have to maintain the trust store in some way. In both cases you mentioned the effects are very negligible and certainly worth the tradeoff, but strictly speaking, the usability is worse.
kragen 6y ago
You've posted this error here before, but there's an enormous amount of research demonstrating its falsehood. SOUPS is now in its 16th year (https://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/ https://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/ has an overview of previous years) and has featured speakers and organizers including Ian Goldberg, Bill Cheswick, Ross Anderson, Adam Shostack, Ed Felten, Daniel Vogel, Chris Soghoian, Adrienne Porter Felt, David Wagner, Mary Ellen Zurko, Ben Laurie, and Lorrie Cranor. If you know anything about security and HCI, you know these people know a lot more than you do about them; they've been leading innovators in both fields for decades. Some of them have been publishing ways to reconcile usability and security since the mid-90s. And they unanimously agree that you're full of shit. In view of the state of research in the field, your statement is at the level of global-warming denialism or homeopathy, if not flat-earthism.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't make your arguments this way on HN. It poisons the community and evokes worse from others. Worst of all, if you're right, i.e. if you're in possession of some truth that others don't know, you end up discrediting the truth by mixing it in with personal attacks, calling names, or other aggressiveness. That phenomenon gets stronger the less-known the truth is, because people will more readily look for reasons to reject a contrarian/minority view than a familiar one. It's important not to supply spurious such reasons, and that means articulating the truth (or what you believe is true) in a way that avoids gratuitous admixtures. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20truth%20discredit&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - kragen 6y ago
    Your policy isn't working. It's letting open-and-shut misinformation like this, the outright denial of the existence of a well-known field of research going back decades, go unchallenged. That's Creationism-level intellectual malpractice. You may succeed in making HN more polite — or, more likely, rude in a more subtle way, like Winston Churchill — but if you do it by reducing it to an echo chamber of vulgar misconceptions like this, is that really a win? How can you improve the epistemic functioning of the community? I'm going to take a break for 81 days now, unless I need to respond to something specifically about something I've written. We'll see what this place looks like then. I'll probably follow it with a longer break.

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