4.2 Social Dynamics Metrics-Working Group Report

Individuals continually interact with security mechanisms when performing tasks in everyday
life. These tasks may serve personal goals or work goals, be individual or shared. These interactions
can be influenced by peers and superiors in the respective environments (workplace,
home, public spaces), by personality traits of the users, as well as by contextual constraints
such as available time, cognitive resources, and perceived available effort.
All these influencing factors, we believe, should be considered in the design, implementation
and maintenance of good socio-technical security mechanisms. Therefore, we need to observe
reliable socio-technical data, and then transform them into meaningful and helpful metrics
for user interactions and influencing factors.
More precisely, there are three main questions that the group discussed:
1. What data do we need to observe and what of this data we actually can observe and
measure?
2. How can we observe and measure?
3. What can we do with the results of the observations?