# Professor of Human-Centred Security

Source: https://startwithidentity.com/experts/angela-sasse/
Last updated: 2026-09-20
License: content by Start with Identity. Cite the source URL.

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## Bio

M. Angela Sasse co-authored "Users Are Not the Enemy" with Anne Adams in 1999, at University College London, and built human-centred security into a research field. The paper showed that password workarounds, reuse, writing credentials down, sharing them, are produced by the policy rather than by careless people.

Profile built from public academic and publication records.

## Where their work shows up

Every argument for [passkeys](https://startwithidentity.com/standards/webauthn-fido2/), for dropping forced rotation, and for treating a help-desk reset queue as a security signal rather than an operational cost traces to this line of work. It also reframed what a control costs: if a policy generates ten thousand workarounds, the workarounds are the real system. See [help desk social engineering](https://startwithidentity.com/techniques/help-desk-social-engineering/), [password spraying](https://startwithidentity.com/techniques/password-spraying/), and [what is passwordless](https://startwithidentity.com/guides/fundamentals/what-is-passwordless/).