Insufficient Psychological Acceptability

The product has a protection mechanism that is too difficult or inconvenient to use, encouraging non-malicious users to disable or bypass the mechanism, whether by accident or on purpose.


Demonstrations

The following examples help to illustrate the nature of this weakness and describe methods or techniques which can be used to mitigate the risk.

Note that the examples here are by no means exhaustive and any given weakness may have many subtle varieties, each of which may require different detection methods or runtime controls.

Example One

In "Usability of Security: A Case Study" [REF-540], the authors consider human factors in a cryptography product. Some of the weakness relevant discoveries of this case study were: users accidentally leaked sensitive information, could not figure out how to perform some tasks, thought they were enabling a security option when they were not, and made improper trust decisions.

Example Two

Enforcing complex and difficult-to-remember passwords that need to be frequently changed for access to trivial resources, e.g., to use a black-and-white printer. Complex password requirements can also cause users to store the passwords in an unsafe manner so they don't have to remember them, such as using a sticky note or saving them in an unencrypted file.

Example Three

Some CAPTCHA utilities produce images that are too difficult for a human to read, causing user frustration.

See Also

Comprehensive Categorization: Violation of Secure Design Principles

Weaknesses in this category are related to violation of secure design principles.

ICS Operations (& Maintenance): Human factors in ICS environments

Weaknesses in this category are related to the "Human factors in ICS environments" category from the SEI ETF "Categories of Security Vulnerabilities in ICS" as publish...

SFP Secondary Cluster: Feature

This category identifies Software Fault Patterns (SFPs) within the Feature cluster.

Comprehensive CWE Dictionary

This view (slice) covers all the elements in CWE.

Entries with Maintenance Notes

CWE entries in this view have maintenance notes. Maintenance notes are an indicator that an entry might change significantly in future versions. This view was created...

Weaknesses Introduced During Design

This view (slice) lists weaknesses that can be introduced during design.


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