3,768 research outputs found
Usable Security: Why Do We Need It? How Do We Get It?
Security experts frequently refer to people as âthe weakest link in the chainâ of system
security. Famed hacker Kevin Mitnick revealed that he hardly ever cracked a password,
because it âwas easier to dupe people into revealing itâ by employing a range of social
engineering techniques. Often, such failures are attributed to usersâ carelessness and
ignorance. However, more enlightened researchers have pointed out that current security
tools are simply too complex for many users, and they have made efforts to improve
user interfaces to security tools. In this chapter, we aim to broaden the current perspective,
focusing on the usability of security tools (or products) and the process of designing
secure systems for the real-world context (the panorama) in which they have to operate.
Here we demonstrate how current human factors knowledge and user-centered design
principles can help security designers produce security solutions that are effective in practice
Challenges of Multi-Factor Authentication for Securing Advanced IoT (A-IoT) Applications
The unprecedented proliferation of smart devices together with novel
communication, computing, and control technologies have paved the way for the
Advanced Internet of Things~(A-IoT). This development involves new categories
of capable devices, such as high-end wearables, smart vehicles, and consumer
drones aiming to enable efficient and collaborative utilization within the
Smart City paradigm. While massive deployments of these objects may enrich
people's lives, unauthorized access to the said equipment is potentially
dangerous. Hence, highly-secure human authentication mechanisms have to be
designed. At the same time, human beings desire comfortable interaction with
their owned devices on a daily basis, thus demanding the authentication
procedures to be seamless and user-friendly, mindful of the contemporary urban
dynamics. In response to these unique challenges, this work advocates for the
adoption of multi-factor authentication for A-IoT, such that multiple
heterogeneous methods - both well-established and emerging - are combined
intelligently to grant or deny access reliably. We thus discuss the pros and
cons of various solutions as well as introduce tools to combine the
authentication factors, with an emphasis on challenging Smart City
environments. We finally outline the open questions to shape future research
efforts in this emerging field.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. The work has been accepted for
publication in IEEE Network, 2019. Copyright may be transferred without
notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl
Conceivable security risks and authentication techniques for smart devices
With the rapidly escalating use of smart devices and fraudulent transaction of usersâ data from their devices, efficient and reliable techniques for authentication of the smart devices have become an obligatory issue. This paper reviews the security risks for mobile devices and studies several authentication techniques available for smart devices. The results from field studies enable a comparative evaluation of user-preferred authentication mechanisms and their opinions about reliability, biometric authentication and visual authentication techniques
A comprehensive study of the usability of multiple graphical passwords
Recognition-based graphical authentication systems (RBGSs) using
images as passwords have been proposed as one potential solution to the need
for more usable authentication. The rapid increase in the technologies requiring
user authentication has increased the number of passwords that users have to
remember. But nearly all prior work with RBGSs has studied the usability of a
single password. In this paper, we present the first published comparison of the
usability of multiple graphical passwords with four different image types:
Mikon, doodle, art and everyday objects (food, buildings, sports etc.). A longi-tudinal experiment was performed with 100 participants over a period of 8
weeks, to examine the usability performance of each of the image types. The re-sults of the study demonstrate that object images are most usable in the sense of
being more memorable and less time-consuming to employ, Mikon images are
close behind but doodle and art images are significantly inferior. The results of
our study complement cognitive literature on the picture superiority effect, vis-ual search process and nameability of visually complex images
Usability and Trust in Information Systems
The need for people to protect themselves and their assets is as old as humankind. People's physical safety and their possessions have always been at risk from deliberate attack or accidental damage. The advance of information technology means that many individuals, as well as corporations, have an additional range of physical (equipment) and electronic (data) assets that are at risk. Furthermore, the increased number and types of interactions in cyberspace has enabled new forms of attack on people and their possessions. Consider grooming of minors in chat-rooms, or Nigerian email cons: minors were targeted by paedophiles before the creation of chat-rooms, and Nigerian criminals sent the same letters by physical mail or fax before there was email. But the technology has decreased the cost of many types of attacks, or the degree of risk for the attackers. At the same time, cyberspace is still new to many people, which means they do not understand risks, or recognise the signs of an attack, as readily as they might in the physical world. The IT industry has developed a plethora of security mechanisms, which could be used to mitigate risks or make attacks significantly more difficult. Currently, many people are either not aware of these mechanisms, or are unable or unwilling or to use them. Security experts have taken to portraying people as "the weakest link" in their efforts to deploy effective security [e.g. Schneier, 2000]. However, recent research has revealed at least some of the problem may be that security mechanisms are hard to use, or be ineffective. The review summarises current research on the usability of security mechanisms, and discusses options for increasing their usability and effectiveness
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