Usability meets security - the Identity-Manager as your personal security assistant for the Internet

In today's applications, most users disregard the security functionality. They do not have the knowledge and/or the motivation to configure or to use the existing security functions correctly. In this paper, we present a new concept to improve the usability of security mechanisms, introducing an extended classification of protection goals. As a result, the everyday use of security functionality can be reduced to selecting the user's identity, which is the basis of the Identity-Manager, a new security tool presented in this paper. It offers a user interface for security functionality that is compatible with all Internet applications, so even inexperienced users are able to configure and negotiate their security needs in a convenient way.