HotSoft

The New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW) was in the Twente region of the Netherlands  this year. As usual, NSPW  invited new ideas, even if there are limitations or incomplete aspects, and everyone who does attended participate throughout. Robert Biddle presented collaborative work with Alain Forget and Sonia Chiasson, called CYOA: Choose Your Own Authentication.

The annual New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW) is not a typical conference. It specifically invites new ideas, even if there are limitations or incomplete aspects. And it only invites people actually presenting or otherwise involved. Moreover, everyone who does attend is expected to participate throughout. And it has a Trojan Rabbit as it’s mascot (pictured above). This year NSPW was in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, Canada. Elizabeth Stobert presented her work on Versipass, A Password Manager That Doesn’t Remember Passwords.

SOUPS, the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, was in Silicon Valley this year: it was held on the campus of Facebook. The number of papers submitted this year was an all time high, and the number of people registering hit the room limit of 200. Another first this year was that the proceedings were published by Usenix, the Advanced Computer Systems Association. They are available free from the Usenix SOUPS 2014 site.

For those of us who spend lots of time doing it, programming is an intense activity. And an intensely human activity. Despite this being experienced since the days of Babbage and Lovelace,  little attention has been devoted to this aspect, but an important exception is the annual Psychology of Programming Workshop, held this year in Brighton, UK. I have followed this workshop from a distance for many years, and this year I was invited to speak: I enjoyed it very much and I hope to attend again. From a perspective of HCI, it always occurs to me that programming systems quickly push beyond the capacity of the models we normally adopt: programming requires immense investment, and the invisible and dynamic complexity remains a formidable challenge for human capabilities. I was especially pleased to have time to chat with Thomas Green, who has influenced my work since I came across his book Human Interaction with Computers (shown above) in a Cambridge bookshop in 1979. It was one of the first books on HCI, before that term was coined, and it addressed many issues which remain challenging today.

This year I was invited to give a presentation at OOP in Munich. OOP has been running for many years, and has grown beyond Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) but kept the name. It has a strong industry orientation, but I found it much different than industry conferences I have attended in North America: there seemed to be less hype, and a more professional attitude. Most sessions were in German, and many in English. I gave presentations on Human Factors in Computer Security, and also on Cultural Issues in Software Development. I also had time to walk around Munich and visit several museums. I was especially impressed by the Deutsches Museum and was pleased to see the extensive exhibit of the early computers of Konrad Zuse (Z3 shown above.)

GRAND is the Canadian network on Graphics, Animation, and New Media. Our annual conference was in Toronto this year, right downtown beside the CN tower at the Toronto Convention Centre. We shared the space with Canada 3.0, a large annual digital media event. For GRAND, this was a transition time: we hope to renew our network in 2014, so there were many discussions about what kind of metamorphosis to propose. For our project on usable privacy and security, we decided on literacy as our new theme: literacy about the technology, the law, and about what actually happens out there.

We’ve recently returned from beautiful Vancouver for the 2nd Annual GRAND Conference. We are part of projects on “Usable Privacy and Security for New Media Environments” and “Digital Games for Learning and Training”. It was an oppportunity to discuss on-going projects, get feedback from others in different disciplines, talk about research priorities, and plan for the next year.

Several Carleton security and usable security researchers attended Financial Cryptography ‘11 in St. Lucia.  We were pleasantly surprised to see that several of the papers addressed human factors and usable security. Our workshop on Authentication was well-attended and generated lots of questions and discussion between attendees and panelists.  The workshop included invited talks by Cormac Herley, Steven Bellovin, and Robert Biddle.