A Trade-Off Model of Software Requirements for Balancing Between Security and Usability Issues

The growing dependence on technology drives the pronounced need of developing secure systems that can easily be used by their users. Security and usability have been widely recognized as two non-functional requirements. Different researchers have argued that handling those requirements in a separate manner is considered as a challenge that affects negatively on developing usable systems that can be easily used by their users. Where the security experts most often endeavor to identify and specify the security requirements to resist the potential harms, attacks, and risks that may face the overall system without paying any attention to the resulting issues and difficulties that may face end users when they handle such systems. Over the last two decades, several researchers have introduced different methodologies to facilitate developing usable security systems. Despite that, the research in this area still requires expending more efforts in order to reach a good trade-off between security and usability requirements. For this purpose, this paper aims to analyze the relation between security and usability requirements in order to design a trade-off model that assists in integrating the experiences of both security and usability experts at the requirement stage for reaching a good compromise between both the security and usability requirements.