System Administrators Are Parting Ways With Command Line Interfaces: An Exploratory Study of Firewall Interfaces

05/31/2019

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by   Artem Voronkov, et al.

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A graphical user interface (GUI) is the most common option to interact with computer systems. However, according to the literature, system administrators often lean toward command line interfaces (CLIs). The goal of our work is to investigate which interfaces security experts prefer and which they actually use in their daily tasks. We collected experiences and opinions from 300 system administrators with the help of an online survey. All our respondents are system administrators who work or have worked with firewalls. Our results show that only 32 figure reaches 60 regarding the strengths and limitations of the interfaces and for which tasks they are used by the security experts. Based on these results, we make design recommendations for firewall interfaces.