Towards Interface Specification and Design Guidelines to raise User Awareness of Application Security

While the discipline of interface specification and design has received substantial attention in the existing body of academic and professional literature, there has been little research conducted into the specification and design of interfaces that allow users to interact with systems in a secure manner. As the awareness of security issues increases amongst the general user community, together with an apparently ever increasing growth in the number of information systems security breaches, the specification and design of “secure interfaces” will become a critical development consideration. This research aims to determine how the specification and design principles identified in the extant body of literature, might be fused with the development practices currently employed within two focus organisations (case study organisations), to synthesise and partially validate a set of interface specification/design guidelines for use when developing interfaces with the ability to raise the security awareness of users.