Guidelines for ethical nudging in password authentication

Nudging has been adopted by many disciplines in the last decade in order to achieve behavioural change. Information security is no exception. A number of attempts have been made to nudge end-users towards stronger passwords. Here we report on our deployment of an enriched nudge displayed to participants on the system enrolment page, when a password has to be chosen. The enriched nudge was successful in that participants chose significantly longer and stronger passwords. One thing that struck us as we designed and tested this nudge was that we were unable to find any nudge-specific ethical guidelines to inform our experimentation in this context. This led us to reflect on the ethical implications of nudge testing, specifically in the password authentication context. We mined the nudge literature and derived a number of core principles of ethical nudging. We tailored these to the password authentication context, and then show how they can be applied by assessing the ethics of our own nudge. We conclude with a set of preliminary guidelines derived from our study to inform other researchers planning to deploy nudge-related techniques in this context

Reconfigurable Security: Edge Computing-based Framework for IoT

In various scenarios, achieving security between IoT devices is challenging since the devices may have different dedicated communication standards, resource constraints as well as various applications. In this article, we first provide requirements and existing solutions for IoT security. We then introduce a new reconfigurable security framework based on edge computing, which utilizes a near-user edge device, i.e., security agent, to simplify key management and offload the computational costs of security algorithms at IoT devices. This framework is designed to overcome the challenges including high computation costs, low flexibility in key management, and low compatibility in deploying new security algorithms in IoT, especially when adopting advanced cryptographic primitives. We also provide the design principles of the reconfigurable security framework, the exemplary security protocols for anonymous authentication and secure data access control, and the performance analysis in terms of feasibility and usability. The reconfigurable security framework paves a new way to strength IoT security by edge computing.Comment: under submission to possible journal publication

Nudging folks towards stronger password choices:providing certainty is the key

Persuading people to choose strong passwords is challenging. One way to influence password strength, as and when people are making the choice, is to tweak the choice architecture to encourage stronger choice. A variety of choice architecture manipulations i.e. “nudges”, have been trialled by researchers with a view to strengthening the overall password profile. None has made much of a difference so far. Here we report on our design of an influential behavioural intervention tailored to the password choice context: a hybrid nudge that significantly prompted stronger passwords.We carried out three longitudinal studies to analyse the efficacy of a range of “nudges” by manipulating the password choice architecture of an actual university web application. The first and second studies tested the efficacy of several simple visual framing “nudges”. Password strength did not budge. The third study tested expiration dates directly linked to password strength. This manipulation delivered a positive result: significantly longer and stronger passwords. Our main conclusion was that the final successful nudge provided participants with absolute certainty as to the benefit of a stronger password, and that it was this certainty that made the difference

InShopnito: an advanced yet privacy-friendly mobile shopping application

Mobile Shopping Applications (MSAs) are rapidly gaining popularity. They enhance the shopping experience, by offering customized recommendations or incorporating customer loyalty programs. Although MSAs are quite effective at attracting new customers and binding existing ones to a retailer's services, existing MSAs have several shortcomings. The data collection practices involved in MSAs and the lack of transparency thereof are important concerns for many customers. This paper presents inShopnito, a privacy-preserving mobile shopping application. All transactions made in inShopnito are unlinkable and anonymous. However, the system still offers the expected features from a modern MSA. Customers can take part in loyalty programs and earn or spend loyalty points and electronic vouchers. Furthermore, the MSA can suggest personalized recommendations even though the retailer cannot construct rich customer profiles. These profiles are managed on the smartphone and can be partially disclosed in order to get better, customized recommendations. Finally, we present an implementation called inShopnito, of which the security and performance is analyzed. In doing so, we show that it is possible to have a privacy-preserving MSA without having to sacrifice practicality

Anonymous reputation based reservations in e-commerce (AMNESIC)

Online reservation systems have grown over the last recent years to facilitate the purchase of goods and services. Generally, reservation systems require that customers provide some personal data to make a reservation effective. With this data, service providers can check the consumer history and decide if the user is trustable enough to get the reserve. Although the reputation of a user is a good metric to implement the access control of the system, providing personal and sensitive data to the system presents high privacy risks, since the interests of a user are totally known and tracked by an external entity. In this paper we design an anonymous reservation protocol that uses reputations to profile the users and control their access to the offered services, but at the same time it preserves their privacy not only from the seller but the service provider

A Mediated Definite Delegation Model allowing for Certified Grid Job Submission

Grid computing infrastructures need to provide traceability and accounting of their users" activity and protection against misuse and privilege escalation. A central aspect of multi-user Grid job environments is the necessary delegation of privileges in the course of a job submission. With respect to these generic requirements this document describes an improved handling of multi-user Grid jobs in the ALICE ("A Large Ion Collider Experiment") Grid Services. A security analysis of the ALICE Grid job model is presented with derived security objectives, followed by a discussion of existing approaches of unrestricted delegation based on X.509 proxy certificates and the Grid middleware gLExec. Unrestricted delegation has severe security consequences and limitations, most importantly allowing for identity theft and forgery of delegated assignments. These limitations are discussed and formulated, both in general and with respect to an adoption in line with multi-user Grid jobs. Based on the architecture of the ALICE Grid Services, a new general model of mediated definite delegation is developed and formulated, allowing a broker to assign context-sensitive user privileges to agents. The model provides strong accountability and long- term traceability. A prototype implementation allowing for certified Grid jobs is presented including a potential interaction with gLExec. The achieved improvements regarding system security, malicious job exploitation, identity protection, and accountability are emphasized, followed by a discussion of non- repudiation in the face of malicious Grid jobs

Network layer access control for context-aware IPv6 applications

As part of the Lancaster GUIDE II project, we have developed a novel wireless access point protocol designed to support the development of next generation mobile context-aware applications in our local environs. Once deployed, this architecture will allow ordinary citizens secure, accountable and convenient access to a set of tailored applications including location, multimedia and context based services, and the public Internet. Our architecture utilises packet marking and network level packet filtering techniques within a modified Mobile IPv6 protocol stack to perform access control over a range of wireless network technologies. In this paper, we describe the rationale for, and components of, our architecture and contrast our approach with other state-of-the- art systems. The paper also contains details of our current implementation work, including preliminary performance measurements