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It seems that the biggest problem with encryption in general is that of incentives. Great UX takes lots of design and iteration, which means someone has to pay

by diafygi 12y ago

It seems that the biggest problem with encryption in general is that of incentives. Great UX takes lots of design and iteration, which means someone has to pay for all those designers and front end devs. However, when you want good encryption, user experience always comes after security, which means you spend the majority of your resources on the security, not the design. So, we end up with great security and terrible user experience. It's (painfully) rational. Sure, every once in a while you have good security luck out and land a great designer (TextSecure), but that's extremely rare. The vast majority of security teams don't value design as much as security because they don't have the incentive to. So how do we fix the incentives? Can we? Should we?

kevan 12y ago
I think part of the solution is to get security teams to recognize that good user experience is a part of secure design. If the interface allows users to make mistakes that compromise security then the software has failed. You can blame users for making mistakes and tell them to read book-length manpages but that doesn't solve the problem. Most users don't want a swiss army knife and directions, they want a complete solution to a specific problem.
saidajigumi 12y ago
> However, when you want good encryption, user experience always comes after security I'm going to throw down a gauntlet: encryption design that doesn't start with designing for the human users is already fundamentally broken. Why? Because it cannot represent a solid system. This isn't machines in the Matrix talking to one another: the needs of the human users are the only thing that matters. Combine that with the past few decades of experience in software encryption systems, and we realize that this is hard to achieve. The non-adoption and misuse of GPG that Moxie speaks of, the train-wreck of passwords, and so on. It really feels like we've hit a wall, where there are no significant gains to be had unless these design problems are taken seriously. "Perfect" cryptosystems that have major real-world usability flaws are in fact worthless. Implementing new systems of this kind is a waste of effort and a disservice to everyone who vitally needs the services of a robust encryption infrastructure.
- sarciszewski 12y ago
  If you can't even get two machines in the Matrix to talk to each other securely, how can you expect to succeed with human error thrown in the mix?
  - saidajigumi 12y ago
    That seems to be a straw-man which misses my point. I'm not saying that cryptosystem or broader security research is without merit; that's obviously false. Rather, the major problems with cryptosystems under large-scale adoption are limited not as much by technical encryption design, but by exactly the lack of human UX design that the parent post referred to. If your thinking about "end-to-end" stops at the computer and not at the human, that's become a rather enormous issue.
navyrain 12y ago
I think you're right that UX and good security are often at odds, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that they _must_. I view the current state of security in applications a a result of two forces: 1) The human dynamics of the roles involved: The disciplines of security and user interface design overlap very infrequently, and very rarely done alongside one another, collaboratively; one always tends to drive the other. For user-friendly and secure communication software to be written in an open source environment, too many stars have to align. 2) The market value of data: Software which can be monitored, and data of its users aggregated, analyzed, acted upon, and sold is more lucrative than making something which is truly secure, even from the authors. I believe usable encryption is possible, but I don't expect it to come from grassroots open source efforts, nor from the big market players. If anyone, I expect to see it come a collaboration between large non-profits (such as Mozilla, EFF), and universities. In the current environment, they're one of the few with sufficient resources, organization, and motivation to get it done.

by diafygi 12y ago

kevan 12y ago

I think part of the solution is to get security teams to recognize that good user experience is a part of secure design. If the interface allows users to make mistakes that compromise security then the software has failed. You can blame users for making mistakes and tell them to read book-length manpages but that doesn't solve the problem. Most users don't want a swiss army knife and directions, they want a complete solution to a specific problem.

saidajigumi 12y ago

> However, when you want good encryption, user experience always comes after security I'm going to throw down a gauntlet: encryption design that doesn't start with designing for the human users is already fundamentally broken. Why? Because it cannot represent a solid system. This isn't machines in the Matrix talking to one another: the needs of the human users are the only thing that matters. Combine that with the past few decades of experience in software encryption systems, and we realize that this is hard to achieve. The non-adoption and misuse of GPG that Moxie speaks of, the train-wreck of passwords, and so on. It really feels like we've hit a wall, where there are no significant gains to be had unless these design problems are taken seriously. "Perfect" cryptosystems that have major real-world usability flaws are in fact worthless. Implementing new systems of this kind is a waste of effort and a disservice to everyone who vitally needs the services of a robust encryption infrastructure.

sarciszewski 12y ago
If you can't even get two machines in the Matrix to talk to each other securely, how can you expect to succeed with human error thrown in the mix?
- saidajigumi 12y ago
  That seems to be a straw-man which misses my point. I'm not saying that cryptosystem or broader security research is without merit; that's obviously false. Rather, the major problems with cryptosystems under large-scale adoption are limited not as much by technical encryption design, but by exactly the lack of human UX design that the parent post referred to. If your thinking about "end-to-end" stops at the computer and not at the human, that's become a rather enormous issue.

navyrain 12y ago

I think you're right that UX and good security are often at odds, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that they _must_. I view the current state of security in applications a a result of two forces: 1) The human dynamics of the roles involved: The disciplines of security and user interface design overlap very infrequently, and very rarely done alongside one another, collaboratively; one always tends to drive the other. For user-friendly and secure communication software to be written in an open source environment, too many stars have to align. 2) The market value of data: Software which can be monitored, and data of its users aggregated, analyzed, acted upon, and sold is more lucrative than making something which is truly secure, even from the authors. I believe usable encryption is possible, but I don't expect it to come from grassroots open source efforts, nor from the big market players. If anyone, I expect to see it come a collaboration between large non-profits (such as Mozilla, EFF), and universities. In the current environment, they're one of the few with sufficient resources, organization, and motivation to get it done.