Poster: Towards Improving Usability of Access Certification Interfaces

Identity management (IdM) comprises the processes and infrastructure for the creation and maintenance of user’s digital identities and the designation of who has access to resources, who grants that access, and how accountability and compliance are maintained. Identity management in organizations is done centrally using an enterprise identity management system (IdM system) or in a distributed fashion using different applications across the organization. IdM involves various sub-activities including configuration and deployment, policy creation, identity creation, management of identity lifecycle, basic and advance provisioning and de-provisioning, audit, access certification, role engineering, and self-service [1]. In this poster, we focus on access certification. Access certification is an activity in which the assignments of permissions to users are reviewed in order to minimize the risk of unauthorized and unmanaged access. In this ongoing work, we studied access certification activity by conducting 10 semi-structured interviews with security practitioners and identified their needs and challenges during performing access certification. We then proposed a new user interface for supporting access certification activity, and plan to evaluate the usability of the interface using a multi-method approach.