Computer Security: Competing Concepts
Helen Nissenbaum, Batya Friedman, Edward Felten

TL;DR
This paper explores a fundamental philosophical tension in web-browser security, revealing two competing conceptions of security—individual protection versus national security—that influence system design and value alignment.
Contribution
It identifies and analyzes the conflicting conceptions of security in computer security, emphasizing the need to choose a primary framework for system design and value integration.
Findings
Two distinct conceptions of security influence system design.
The ordinary security conception focuses on protecting users.
The national security conception emphasizes state protection.
Abstract
This paper focuses on a tension we discovered in the philosophical part of our multidisciplinary project on values in web-browser security. Our project draws on the methods and perspectives of empirical social science, computer science, and philosophy to identify values embodied in existing web-browser security and also to prescribe changes to existing systems (in particular, Mozilla) so that values relevant to web-browser systems are better served than presently they are. The tension, which we had not seen explicitly addressed in any other work on computer security, emerged when we set out to extract from the concept of security the set values that ought to guide the shape of web-browser security. We found it impossible to construct an internally consistent set of values until we realized that two robust -- and in places competing -- conceptions of computer security were influencing…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPrivacy, Security, and Data Protection · Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
