286 research outputs found

    Universal design for website authentication:views and experiences of senior citizens

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    Using digital devices and online products and services requires users to regularly authenticate themselves. Given that the vast majority of websites use passwords to authenticate users, this study focuses on the accessibility and inclusivity of this mechanism, using Universal Design Principles as a lens. Collecting and analysing autobiographical narrative data from 50 respondents, we use a qualitative approach to explore the views and experiences of senior citizens across various phases of website authentication. Our analysis uncovers barriers and challenges, leading to several undesirable consequences, when authentication is not accessible and inclusive. Our findings also show how users, many of whom have cognitive and other age-related infirmities which are seldom accommodated in authentication design, try to cope with these issues. Our findings show how authentication may fail to align with the principles of universal design and highlight considerations in making authentication more accessible and inclusive for all users

    Usability, Efficiency and Security of Personal Computing Technologies

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    New personal computing technologies such as smartphones and personal fitness trackers are widely integrated into user lifestyles. Users possess a wide range of skills, attributes and backgrounds. It is important to understand user technology practices to ensure that new designs are usable and productive. Conversely, it is important to leverage our understanding of user characteristics to optimize new technology efficiency and effectiveness. Our work initially focused on studying older users, and personal fitness tracker users. We applied the insights from these investigations to develop new techniques improving user security protections, computational efficiency, and also enhancing the user experience. We offer that by increasing the usability, efficiency and security of personal computing technology, users will enjoy greater privacy protections along with experiencing greater enjoyment of their personal computing devices. Our first project resulted in an improved authentication system for older users based on familiar facial images. Our investigation revealed that older users are often challenged by traditional text passwords, resulting in decreased technology use or less than optimal password practices. Our graphical password-based system relies on memorable images from the user\u27s personal past history. Our usability study demonstrated that this system was easy to use, enjoyable, and fast. We show that this technique is extendable to smartphones. Personal fitness trackers are very popular devices, often worn by users all day. Our personal fitness tracker investigation provides the first quantitative baseline of usage patterns with this device. By exploring public data, real-world user motivations, reliability concerns, activity levels, and fitness-related socialization patterns were discerned. This knowledge lends insight to active user practices. Personal user movement data is captured by sensors, then analyzed to provide benefits to the user. The dynamic time warping technique enables comparison of unequal data sequences, and sequences containing events at offset times. Existing techniques target short data sequences. Our Phase-aware Dynamic Time Warping algorithm focuses on a class of sinusoidal user movement patterns, resulting in improved efficiency over existing methods. Lastly, we address user data privacy concerns in an environment where user data is increasingly flowing to manufacturer remote cloud servers for analysis. Our secure computation technique protects the user\u27s privacy while data is in transit and while resident on cloud computing resources. Our technique also protects important data on cloud servers from exposure to individual users

    Multi-Factor Authentication: A Survey

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    Today, digitalization decisively penetrates all the sides of the modern society. One of the key enablers to maintain this process secure is authentication. It covers many different areas of a hyper-connected world, including online payments, communications, access right management, etc. This work sheds light on the evolution of authentication systems towards Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) starting from Single-Factor Authentication (SFA) and through Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). Particularly, MFA is expected to be utilized for human-to-everything interactions by enabling fast, user-friendly, and reliable authentication when accessing a service. This paper surveys the already available and emerging sensors (factor providers) that allow for authenticating a user with the system directly or by involving the cloud. The corresponding challenges from the user as well as the service provider perspective are also reviewed. The MFA system based on reversed Lagrange polynomial within Shamir’s Secret Sharing (SSS) scheme is further proposed to enable more flexible authentication. This solution covers the cases of authenticating the user even if some of the factors are mismatched or absent. Our framework allows for qualifying the missing factors by authenticating the user without disclosing sensitive biometric data to the verification entity. Finally, a vision of the future trends in MFA is discussed.Peer reviewe

    A Study of Stem and Non-Stem College Students’ Smart TV Attitudes (The Trade-Off Between Functionality and Security/Privacy)

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    Internet-of-Things (IoT) usage surged over the past decade, and its advancement of intricate devices brings obvious convenience to users. IoT devices such as Smart TVs offer services and features that are desirable and favorable to consumers. However, all that convenience comes with security and privacy concerns. Smart TVs have been the target of attacks due to their internet connectivity. Moreover, personally identifiable information (PII), browsing history, and watching preferences, are being collected, leaked, and sold. Previous research showed that users care that their data is protected but have minimal privacy awareness. Moreover, some researchers claimed that even if consumers were made aware of privacy issues, using the smart TVs’ functionalities took higher precedence than protecting their privacy. This study will extend previous studies and investigate claims that informing users about privacy does not change their attitudes. The aim is to investigate different groups of students at a small mid-western public institution of higher education: across domains, STEM and Non-STEM programs, junior/senior and freshmen/sophomore students’ responses and attitudes will be compared. The research will investigate whether training and exposure to security programs and courses affect students’ security and privacy knowledge, awareness, and attitudes

    Trinity Tripod, 2004-09-21

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    How Unique Is a Face: An Investigative Study

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    International audienceFace recognition has been widely accepted as a means of identification in applications ranging from border control to security in the banking sector. Surprisingly, while widely accepted, we still lack the understanding of uniqueness or distinctiveness of faces as biometric modality. In this work, we study the impact of factors such as image resolution, feature representation, database size, age and gender on uniqueness denoted by the Kullback-Leibler divergence between genuine and impostor distributions. Towards understanding the impact, we present experimental results on the datasets AT&T, LFW, IMDb-Face, as well as ND-TWINS, with the feature extraction algorithms VGGFace, VGG16, ResNet50, InceptionV3, MobileNet and DenseNet121, that reveal the quantitative impact of the named factors. While these are early results, our findings indicate the need for a better understanding of the concept of biometric uniqueness and its implication on face recognition

    Can regional community web portals become sustainable? : the Albany GateWAy : a case study

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    Asking the question can regional and community web portals become sustainable? demands a foray into many different disciplines. Sociology, education, business, strategic and knowledge management, organisational theory, relationship management and current technological trends and capabilities are some of the areas on which community projects, such us the development of communities on-line, are founded

    When keystroke meets password: Attacks and defenses

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    Arbiter, February 21

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