Investigating System Operators’ Perspective on Security Misconfigurations

Constanze Dietrich, Katharina Krombholz, Kevin Borgolte, Tobias Fiebig

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

61 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Nowadays, security incidents have become a familiar “nuisance,” and they regularly lead to the exposure of private and sensitive data. The root causes for such incidents are rarely complex attacks. Instead, the attacks are straight-forward, and they are enabled by simple misconfigurations, such as authentication not being required, or security updates not being installed. For example, the leak of over 140 million Americans’ private data from Equifax’s systems ranks among most severe misconfigurations in recent history: The underlying vulnerability was long known, and a security patch had been readily available for months, but it was never applied. Ultimately, Equifax blamed an employee for forgetting to update the affected system, highlighting the personal responsibility of that operator. In this paper, we investigate the operators’ perspective on security misconfigurations to approach the human component of this class of security issues. We focus our analysis on system operators, as although they are the relevant actors managing the affected systems, they have not yet received significant attention by prior research. We follow an inductive approach and apply a multi-step empirical methodology: (i) a qualitative study to understand how to approach the target group and measure the misconfiguration phenomenon, and (ii) a quantitative survey rooted in the qualitative data. We then provide the first analysis of system operators’ perspective on security misconfigurations, and we determine the factors that operators perceive as the root causes. Based on our findings, we provide practical recommendations on how to reduce security misconfigurations’ frequency and impact.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS ’18)
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Number of pages18
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018
Event25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security - Toronto, Canada
Duration: 15 Oct 201819 Oct 2018

Conference

Conference25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Abbreviated titleACM CCS 2018
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto
Period15/10/1819/10/18

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Investigating System Operators’ Perspective on Security Misconfigurations'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this