Optimizing a policy authoring framework for security and privacy policies

Abstract

Policies which address security and privacy are pervasive parts of both technical and social systems, and technology to enable both organizations and individuals to create and manage such policies is seen as a critical need in IT. This paper describes policy authoring as a key component to usable privacy and security systems, and advances the notions of policy templates in a policy management environment in which different roles with different skill sets are seen as important. We discuss existing guidelines and provide support for the addition of new guidelines for usable policy authoring for security and privacy systems. We describe the relationship between general policy templates and specific policies, and the skills necessary to author each of these in a way that produces high-quality policies. We also report on an experiment in which technical users with limited policy experience authored policy templates using a prototype template authoring user interface we developed.