What's on Users' Minds? Toward a Usable Smart Phone Security Model

Smart phones pose new challenges to usable security. Current means of specifying security policies or preferences for resource sharing are either woefully inadequate or too hard to use. This article presents a policy model approach toward usable security for smart phones. In particular, the approach adopts a semantic-based policy representation to help users' understanding of security policies and to better reflect what users really want. Furthermore, given the special nature of smart phones' usage, social awareness plays an important role. In this regard, the authors present propose a socially-aware policy reasoning model based on the results of a user study.