Socio-technical thinking postulates that people, machines and the context need to be considered when designing socio-technical systems. Thus, the role of humans in security-critical socio-technical systems is crucial, as these systems have both human and technical components that need to work together to achieve primary tasks, as well as achieve the enabling task of securing that system effectively.
While in recent years, and in particular following the Snowden revelations, a plethora of secure instant messaging applications have come into existence — with some of them reaching significant popularity — the wide user adoption figures cannot be asserted in the case of secure e-mail. With the total number of business and consumer e-mails sent and received per day, estimated to have exceeded 281 billion according to the Radicati Group, it is clear that the need of securing e-mail communication is as relevant and pressing today as it was two decades ago when the first usability studies showed significant problems with the existing e-mail encryption mechanisms.
The IRiSC Lab | APSIA | SnT and the HCI Research Group will conduct a series of user studies on secure email in the forthcoming period.
We would like to invite you to express your interest to participate in these studies and be notified once the registration period opens.
More details will follow soon.
For any questions, please contact borce.stojkovski@uni.lu.
