Vision: Design Fiction for Cybersecurity: Using Science Fiction to Help Software Developers Anticipate Problems

Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin, José-Rodrigo Córdoba-Pachón, Charles Weir, Soteris Demetriou, Lynne Coventry

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

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Abstract

Security and privacy issues are an ever-increasing problem for software systems. To address them, software developers must anticipate the problems that their developed systems may face, using a process we call ‘threat assessment’. Unfortunately, given the shortage of security experts, and the need to ‘think laterally’, threat assessment is very difficult for many development teams. One possibility is to use stories, known as ‘Design Fiction,’ to help developers visualize different contexts and future use for their software. But such stories are themselves difficult to write. A recent pilot project investigated using a broad-brush threat model and fiction samples derived from existing science fiction literature to help developers create threat assessments for Health Internet-of-Things devices. The preliminary results are encouraging, and open the possibility of developing a method to support developers in threat assessment in any domain.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEuroUSEC '22: Proceedings of the 2022 European Symposium on Usable Security
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages79-84
Number of pages6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 5 Oct 2022

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