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What Users Want: Adapting Qualitative Research Methods to Security Policy Elicitation

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Computer Security (SECPRE 2017, CyberICPS 2017)

Abstract

Recognising that the codes uncovered during a Grounded Theory analysis of semi-structured interview data can be interpreted as policy attributes, this paper describes how a Qualitative Research-based methodology can be extended to elicit Attribute Based Access Control style policies. In this methodology, user-participants are interviewed, and machine-learning is used to build a Bayesian Network based policy from the subsequent (Grounded Theory) analysis of the interview data.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    was chosen for expediency.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Simon O’Donovan who prototyped the Android photograph sharing assistant for his UCC Bachelor’s degree project. This work was supported, in part, by Science Foundation Ireland grant SFI/12/RC/2289 and by the Cyber CNI Chair of Institute Mines-Télécom which is held by IMT Atlantique and supported by Airbus Defence and Space, Amossys, EDF, Orange, La Poste, Nokia, Société Générale and the Regional Council of Brittany; it has been acknowledged by the French Centre of Excellence in Cybersecurity.

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Correspondence to Simon N. Foley .

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A Sample policy

A Sample policy

1.1 A.1 Marked up interview text

figure m

1.2 A.2 Generated Bayesian Network Policy

figure n

The above Bayesian network, in Hugin .net format, was generated by SamIam [11] using EM-learning on the dataset given in Fig. 5. Note that in this implemented policy, each complementary state ! v is encoded as literal XXXNOT v.

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Rooney, V.M., Foley, S.N. (2018). What Users Want: Adapting Qualitative Research Methods to Security Policy Elicitation. In: Katsikas, S., et al. Computer Security. SECPRE CyberICPS 2017 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10683. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72817-9_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72817-9_15

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