Tech Giants, Researchers Team Up for “Simply Secure” Initiative

Google, Dropbox, the Open Technology Fund and several security researchers have joined forces for a new initiative that focuses on usable secure technologies.

The organization, called Simply Secure, wants to work with security and privacy experts, software developers, designers and user-experience specialists for creating open source security tools that are easy to use even by less tech-savvy people.

Simply Secure is led by Sara “Scout” Sinclair Brody, a product management and usability consultant who previously worked for Google, contributing to projects like Android, two-factor authentication and uProxy.

“Simply Secure represents an exciting opportunity to bring together diverse groups in pursuit of an important goal: making security and privacy tools more user-friendly. This transparent, community-focused approach is new, and represents a compelling adaptation of the open-source model to interaction design. Usable security has been a passion of mine for the past ten years, and I’m thrilled to be leading such a wide-ranging and well-supported initiative,” Sinclair Brody said.

The organization’s advisory board includes Angela Sasse, head of information security research at University College London; author and activist Cory Doctorow; Apache Software Foundation Co-Founder and Google Security Engineer Ben Laurie; Ben Scott, senior advisor to the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation in Washington DC; Ian Goldberg, author of the OTR encryption protocol; and Wendy Seltzer, policy counsel to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Simply Secure was launched because while there are numerous security solutions that are efficient from a technical standpoint, many of them are difficult to use, which leads to low adoption rates.

“Encryption-based solutions could provide effective protection against threats that affect ordinary users: phishing, keylogging, eavesdropping. But most security solutions are security measures are ineffective because they are too complex or time-consuming – so people make mistakes and give up,” said Sasse. “That does not mean they don’t want effective protection – people prefer to use the Internet and mobile services without constant worries. Simply Secure will create solutions that provide effective protection, so users can have peace-of-mind without mental gymnastics or constant tedious housekeeping tasks.”

“If technology is secure but impossible to use, is it really secure? It’s a challenge to provide proven, open source tools to the public in ways that meet their high expectations and modern use cases. With its clear mission, an exceptional board, and a community-focused approach, we believe Simply Secure can bring us much closer to a world in which ubiquitous security is the norm,” said Meredith Whittaker, Open Source Research Lead at Google.