Security Warning Life Cycle: Challenges and Panacea

Abstract

Security warning is a very important aspect in computer security. Security warning is a form of message conveyed to inform user on the risk of allowing an application to run on the computer system. Security warning plays an important role in notify, warn and advise user about the potential result of an action beforehand. However, security warnings are often being ignored due to various reasons such as poor design of security warnings and too many technical terms used in security warnings. This research highlights insights into the discovery of problems and difficulties encountered by the users, approaches in improving security warnings and future direction of the security warning improvement process. We proposed to utilise the hybrid approach of iterative design and mental model in the effort to enhance the current implementation of security warning. Iterative design is a cyclic design process where prototyping, testing and refining are done repeatedly. A mental model is a person’s psychological representation of how they perceive and understand something. It is expected that this paper would benefit the researchers to comprehend approches and challenges to improve security warnings.