“This is the way ‘I’ create my passwords ...":does the endowment effect deter people from changing the way they create their passwords?

The endowment effect is the term used to describe a phenomenon that manifests as a reluctance to relinquish owned artifacts, even when a viable or better substitute is offered. It has been confirmed by multiple studies when it comes to ownership of physical artifacts. If computer users also "own", and are attached to, their personal security routines, such feelings could conceivably activate the same endowment effect. This would, in turn, lead to their over-estimating the \value" of their existing routines, in terms of the protection they afford, and the risks they mitigate. They might well, as a consequence, not countenance any efforts to persuade them to adopt a more secure routine, because their comparison of pre-existing and proposed new routine is skewed by the activation of the endowment effect.In this paper, we report on an investigation into the possibility that the endowment effect activates when people adopt personal password creation routines. We did indeed find evidence that the endowment effect is likely to be triggered in this context. This constitutes one explanation for the failure of many security awareness drives to improve password strength. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research to confirm our findings, and to investigate the activation of the effect for other security routines

Case study:exploring children’s password knowledge and practices

Children use technology from a very young age, and often have to authenticate themselves. Yet very little attention has been paid to designing authentication specifically for this particular target group. The usual practice is to deploy the ubiquitous password, and this might well be a suboptimal choice. Designing authentication for children requires acknowledgement of child-specific developmental challenges related to literacy, cognitive abilities and differing developmental stages. Understanding the current state of play is essential, to deliver insights that can inform the development of child-centred authentication mechanisms and processes. We carried out a systematic literature review of all research related to children and authentication since 2000. A distinct research gap emerged from the analysis. Thus, we designed and administered a survey to school children in the United States (US), so as to gain insights into their current password usage and behaviors. This paper reports preliminary results from a case study of 189 children (part of a much larger research effort). The findings highlight age-related differences in children’s password understanding and practices. We also discovered that children confuse concepts of safety and security. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research. This paper reports on work in progress.<br/

Computer Abuse: The Emerging Crime and the Need for Legislation

Advancements in computerization and the growing use of computers in business, government, education, and the private sector has resulted in the expanding potential for criminal infiltration. The problems of computer crime are in great part attributable to the shortcomings of our criminal laws, which were written long before there was knowledge of computer crimes. Moreover, there is a reluctance of our legal establishments to adapt to the new technology\u27s potential harm. This Note urges that new federal legislation be passed as a means to counteract future computer crimes

Between Hype and Understatement: Reassessing Cyber Risks as a Security Strategy

Most of the actions that fall under the trilogy of cyber crime, terrorism,and war exploit pre-existing weaknesses in the underlying technology.Because these vulnerabilities that exist in the network are not themselvesillegal, they tend to be overlooked in the debate on cyber security. A UKreport on the cost of cyber crime illustrates this approach. Its authors chose to exclude from their analysis the costs in anticipation of cyber crime, such as insurance costs and the costs of purchasing anti-virus software on the basis that "these are likely to be factored into normal day-to-day expenditures for the Government, businesses, and individuals. This article contends if these costs had been quantified and integrated into the cost of cyber crime, then the analysis would have revealed that what matters is not so much cyber crime, but the fertile terrain of vulnerabilities that unleash a range of possibilities to whomever wishes to exploit them. By downplaying the vulnerabilities, the threats represented by cyber war, cyber terrorism, and cyber crime are conversely inflated. Therefore, reassessing risk as a strategy for security in cyberspace must include acknowledgment of understated vulnerabilities, as well as a better distributed knowledge about the nature and character of the overhyped threats of cyber crime, cyber terrorism, and cyber war

Cyber-crime Science = Crime Science + Information Security

Cyber-crime Science is an emerging area of study aiming to prevent cyber-crime by combining security protection techniques from Information Security with empirical research methods used in Crime Science. Information security research has developed techniques for protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information assets but is less strong on the empirical study of the effectiveness of these techniques. Crime Science studies the effect of crime prevention techniques empirically in the real world, and proposes improvements to these techniques based on this. Combining both approaches, Cyber-crime Science transfers and further develops Information Security techniques to prevent cyber-crime, and empirically studies the effectiveness of these techniques in the real world. In this paper we review the main contributions of Crime Science as of today, illustrate its application to a typical Information Security problem, namely phishing, explore the interdisciplinary structure of Cyber-crime Science, and present an agenda for research in Cyber-crime Science in the form of a set of suggested research questions

Discriminative models for multi-instance problems with tree-structure

Modeling network traffic is gaining importance in order to counter modern threats of ever increasing sophistication. It is though surprisingly difficult and costly to construct reliable classifiers on top of telemetry data due to the variety and complexity of signals that no human can manage to interpret in full. Obtaining training data with sufficiently large and variable body of labels can thus be seen as prohibitive problem. The goal of this work is to detect infected computers by observing their HTTP(S) traffic collected from network sensors, which are typically proxy servers or network firewalls, while relying on only minimal human input in model training phase. We propose a discriminative model that makes decisions based on all computer's traffic observed during predefined time window (5 minutes in our case). The model is trained on collected traffic samples over equally sized time window per large number of computers, where the only labels needed are human verdicts about the computer as a whole (presumed infected vs. presumed clean). As part of training the model itself recognizes discriminative patterns in traffic targeted to individual servers and constructs the final high-level classifier on top of them. We show the classifier to perform with very high precision, while the learned traffic patterns can be interpreted as Indicators of Compromise. In the following we implement the discriminative model as a neural network with special structure reflecting two stacked multi-instance problems. The main advantages of the proposed configuration include not only improved accuracy and ability to learn from gross labels, but also automatic learning of server types (together with their detectors) which are typically visited by infected computers

Sphinx: A Secure Architecture Based on Binary Code Diversification and Execution Obfuscation

Sphinx, a hardware-software co-design architecture for binary code and runtime obfuscation. The Sphinx architecture uses binary code diversification and self-reconfigurable processing elements to maintain application functionality while obfuscating the binary code and architecture states to attackers. This approach dramatically reduces an attacker's ability to exploit information gained from one deployment to attack another deployment. Our results show that the Sphinx is able to decouple the program's execution time, power and memory and I/O activities from its functionality. It is also practical in the sense that the system (both software and hardware) overheads are minimal.Comment: Boston Area Architecture 2018 Workshop (BARC18

Hiding in Plain Sight: A Longitudinal Study of Combosquatting Abuse

Domain squatting is a common adversarial practice where attackers register domain names that are purposefully similar to popular domains. In this work, we study a specific type of domain squatting called "combosquatting," in which attackers register domains that combine a popular trademark with one or more phrases (e.g., betterfacebook[.]com, youtube-live[.]com). We perform the first large-scale, empirical study of combosquatting by analyzing more than 468 billion DNS records---collected from passive and active DNS data sources over almost six years. We find that almost 60% of abusive combosquatting domains live for more than 1,000 days, and even worse, we observe increased activity associated with combosquatting year over year. Moreover, we show that combosquatting is used to perform a spectrum of different types of abuse including phishing, social engineering, affiliate abuse, trademark abuse, and even advanced persistent threats. Our results suggest that combosquatting is a real problem that requires increased scrutiny by the security community.Comment: ACM CCS 1