4th Workshop on Socio-Technical Aspects in Security and Trust
Co-located with 27th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)
Motivation
Today, security threats are hardly sheer technical. They are rather socio-technical threats and come from adversaries who combine social engineering practices with technical skills to circumvent the defenses of information systems. Socio-technical attacks often succeed by exploiting the users' ill-understanding of security mechanisms or loopholes in poorly designed user interfaces and unclear security policies. In securing systems against these threats, humans obviously cannot be treated as machines. Humans have peculiar decision making. But their actions and behavioural patterns, despite apparently irrational, are perfectly justifiable from a cognitive and a social perspective. Computer security hence appears to acquire more and more the facets of an interdisciplinary science with roots in both interpretive and positivist research traditions.
Goals
The workshop intends to foster an interdisciplinary discussion on how to model and analyse the socio-technical aspects of modern security systems and on how to protect such systems from socio-technical threats and attacks. It aims to stimulate an active exchange of ideas and experiences from different communities of researchers in order to identify weaknesses potentially emerging from poor usability designs and policies, from social engineering, and from deficiencies hidden in flawed interfaces and implementations. It will bring together experts in computer security and in cognitive, social, and behavioral sciences; it will collect the state of the art, identify open and emerging problems, and propose future research directions.
