SoK: The Design Paradigm of Safe and Secure Defaults
Jukka Ruohonen
TL;DR
This SoK surveys the design paradigm of safe and secure defaults, tracing its origins to Saltzer and Schroeder and mapping its evolution across domains, especially IoT. Using a systematic mapping/scoping approach, the authors analyze 148 primary studies from ACM/IEEE venues to reveal broad domain adoption, emergent principles like off-by-default and zero trust, and persistent challenges including human factors and trade-offs. The findings show IoT as a major driver of insecure defaults, a shift toward differentiation between default-on and default-off security features, and the need for empirical validation and regulatory alignment. The work highlights practical implications for practitioners and policymakers, underscoring the paradigm's ongoing relevance and the importance of structured knowledge catalogs and future research directions.
Abstract
In security engineering, including software security engineering, there is a well-known design paradigm telling to prefer safe and secure defaults. The paper presents a systematization of knowledge (SoK) of this paradigm by the means of a systematic mapping study and a scoping review of relevant literature. According to the mapping and review, the paradigm has been extensively discussed, used, and developed further since the late 1990s. Partially driven by the insecurity of the Internet of things, the volume of publications has accelerated from the circa mid-2010s onward. The publications reviewed indicate that the paradigm has been adopted in numerous different contexts. It has also been expanded with security design principles not originally considered when the paradigm was initiated in the mid-1970s. Among the newer principles are an "off by default" principle, various overriding and fallback principles, as well as those related to the zero trust model. The review also indicates problems developers and others have faced with the paradigm.