The Performative Security Trap: When Looking Secure Trumps Being Secure

In the cybersecurity field, we regularly encounter a troubling phenomenon I've come to call the "Performative Security Trap." This is when organizations implement security measures not for their effectiveness, but for how they appear to others—regulators, customers, or executive leadership. After years of consulting across sectors, I've observed this pattern consistently enough to recognize it as a systemic issue worth deeper examination.

The Verification Case Study

Consider this recent experience: To reactivate a dormant SIM card I've been paying for (but not using) for three years, a company demanded either an unencrypted passport scan via email or an in-person visit requiring 5,000 miles of travel. When offered multiple secure alternatives—sending the passport through encrypted channels, using multi-factor verification across different communication methods, or providing alternative identification—the answer remained inflexibly negative.

This is performative security in its purest form: a process that looks rigorous while actually creating more security risks than it solves.

Beyond Appearances: Understanding Performative Security

Performative security manifests when the appearance of protection becomes more important than actual protection. Like the additional screening at boarding gates for certain flights that occurs after passengers have already cleared the main security checkpoint—it rarely adds meaningful security but creates the comforting illusion of thoroughness. Anyone who ever took a flight to Tel-Aviv knows exactly what I'm talking about.

The most dangerous aspect isn't just inefficiency—it's that performative measures often create new vulnerabilities while masking existing ones. When a company insists on unencrypted passport transmission via email, they're essentially demanding customers create identity theft opportunities in the name of "verification."

The Organizational Psychology Behind the Problem

What drives this counterproductive approach? In my consulting experience, several factors consistently emerge:

1. Compliance-oriented thinking: Organizations focus on checking regulatory boxes rather than achieving security outcomes.
2. Risk transfer: By implementing visibly strict measures, organizations shift liability and blame to customers ("you didn't follow our procedures").
3. Security theater as business strategy: Creating the appearance of rigorous security can be a marketing tool, even when it's substantively flawed.
4. Institutional paralysis: Security processes become organizational dogma that remains unquestioned despite changing threat landscapes.
5. Metric confusion: Companies measure security by process adherence rather than by vulnerability reduction.

The Verification-Vulnerability Paradox

Perhaps the most troubling pattern is how strict verification processes increasingly drive customers toward insecure behaviors:

• Customers store and share sensitive documents in email accounts where they remain indefinitely vulnerable
• People create "verification documents" that are modified or partially redacted, introducing document fraud risks
• Workarounds emerge where credentials are shared through unauthorized channels
• Legitimate customers abandon accounts, creating dormant security liabilities

Organizations implementing these processes rarely measure these consequential behaviors, focusing instead on process compliance rates.

From Performance to Protection: A Framework for Change

Based on extensive security assessments, here's how organizations can escape the performative security trap:

1. Measure security outcomes, not process adherence: Success isn't "percentage of customers who completed verification process" but "reduction in fraudulent account access while maintaining legitimate access."
2. Design for the exceptional case: Create secure escalation paths that maintain security while accommodating real-world variations.
3. Implement proportional verification: Match verification intensity to the actual risk level of the requested action.
4. Test for security circumvention: Regularly assess whether security measures drive insecure workarounds.
5. Prioritize security over the appearance of security: Sometimes the most effective security measures are invisible or seem counterintuitively simple.

Breaking Free from Security Theater

The most sophisticated organizations recognize that truly effective security often doesn't look impressive from the outside. It operates quietly in the background, creating minimal friction for legitimate users while invisibly blocking actual threats.

Security leaders must ask: "Are we securing our systems and users, or are we performing security rituals that primarily serve organizational narratives?"

Conclusion

The security verification paradox reveals a larger problem in how we approach protection in the digital age. When procedures themselves become the objective rather than the means to achieve security, we create systems that undermine their very purpose.

The essential question every security professional should ask isn't "Does this look secure?" but rather "Does this actually improve our security posture without creating new vulnerabilities?" Until organizations prioritize the latter over the former, we'll continue seeing absurd situations where "security requirements" become the very vector through which security is compromised.