Open Access

Luigi Lo Iacono, Matthew Smith, Emanuel von Zezschwitz, Peter Leo Gorski, Peter Nehren

• We present an evaluation of usable security principles and patterns to facilitate the transfer of existing knowledge to researchers and practitioners. Based on a literature review we extracted 23 common usable security principles and 47 usable security patterns and identified their interconnection. The results indicate that current research tends to focus on only a subset of important principles. The fact that some principles are not yet addressed by any design patterns suggests that further work on refining these patterns is needed. We developed an online repository, which stores the harmonized principles and patterns. The tool enables users to search for relevant patterns and explore them in an interactive and programmatic manner. We argue that both the insights presented in this paper and the repository will be highly valuable for students for getting a good overview, practitioners for implementing usable security and researchers for identifying areas of future research.