CMU-CS-08-143
Computer Science Department
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University


CMU-CS-08-143

Expandable Grids:
A User Interface Visualization Technique and
a Policy Semantics to Support Fast, Accurate Security
and Privacy Policy Authoring

Robert W. Reeder

July 2008

Ph.D. Thesis

CMU-CS-08-143.pdf


Keywords: Security, privacy, visualization, information visualization, policy, usability; P3P, policy authoring

This thesis addresses the problem of designing user interfaces to support creating, editing, and viewing security and privacy policies. Policies are declarations of who may access what under which conditions. Creating, editing, and viewing–in a word, authoring–accurate policies is essential to keeping resources both available to those who are authorized to use them and secure from those who are not. User interfaces for policy authoring can greatly affect whether policies match their authors' intentions; a bad user interface can lead to policies with many errors, while a good user interface can ensure that a policy matches its author' intentions. Traditional methods of displaying security and privacy policies in user interfaces are deficient because they place an undue burden on policy authors to interpret nuanced rules or convoluted natural language.

We introduce the Expandable Grid, a novel technique for displaying policies in a user interface. An Expandable Grid is an interactive matrix visualization designed to address the problems that traditional policy-authoring interfaces have in conveying policies to users. This thesis describes the Expandable Grid concept, then presents three pieces of work centered on the concept:

  • a design, implementation, and evaluation of a system using an Expandable Grid for setting file permissions in the Microsoft Windows XP operating system;
  • a description and evaluation of a file-permissions policy semantics that complements the Expandable Grid particularly well for reducing policy-authoring errors; and
  • a design, implementation, and evaluation of a system using an Expandable Grid for displaying website privacy policies to Web users.
The evaluations of the Expandable Grid system for setting file permissions and its associated policy semantics show that the Expandable Grid can greatly improve the speed and accuracy with which policy authors complete tasks compared to traditional policy-authoring interfaces. However, the evaluation of the Expandable Grid system for displaying website privacy policies suggest some limitations of the Grid concept. We conclude that the Expandable Grid is a beneficial promising approach to policy-authoring interface design, but that it must be applied with care and tailored to each domain to which it is applied.

207 pages

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