“Employees Who Don’t Accept the Time Security Takes Are Not Aware Enough”: The CISO View of Human-Centred Security

In larger organisations, the security controls and policies that protect employees are typically managed by a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). In research, industry, and policy, there are increasing efforts to relate principles of human behaviour interventions and influence to the practice of the CISO, despite these being complex disciplines in their own right. Here we explore how well the concepts of human-centred security (HCS) have survived exposure to the needs of practice: in an action research approach we engaged with n=30 members of a Swiss-based community of CISOs in five workshop sessions over the course of 8 months, dedicated to discussing HCS. We coded and analysed over 25 hours of notes we took during the discussions. We found that CISOs far and foremost perceive HCS as what is available on the market, namely awareness and phishing simulations. While they regularly shift responsibility either to the management (by demanding more support) or to the employees (by blaming them) we see a lack of power but also silo-thinking that prevents CISOs from considering actual human behaviour and friction that security causes for employees. We conclude that industry best practices and the state-of-the-art in HCS research are not aligned.