19,963 research outputs found
Why Do People Adopt, or Reject, Smartphone Password Managers?
People use weak passwords for a variety of reasons, the most prescient of these being memory load and inconvenience. The motivation to choose weak passwords is even more compelling on Smartphones because entering complex passwords is particularly time consuming and arduous on small devices. Many of the memory- and inconvenience-related issues can be ameliorated by using a password manager app. Such an app can generate, remember and automatically supply passwords to websites and other apps on the phone. Given this potential, it is unfortunate that these applications have not enjoyed widespread adoption. We carried out a study to find out why this was so, to investigate factors that impeded or encouraged password manager adoption. We found that a number of factors mediated during all three phases of adoption: searching, deciding and trialling. The study’s findings will help us to market these tools more effectively in order to encourage future adoption of password managers
An investigation into the “beautification” of security ceremonies
“Beautiful Security” is a paradigm that requires security ceremonies to contribute to the ‘beauty’ of a user experience. The underlying assumption is that people are likely to be willing to engage with more beautiful security ceremonies. It is hoped that such ceremonies will minimise human deviations from the prescribed interaction, and that security will be improved as a consequence. In this paper, we explain how we went about deriving beautification principles, and how we tested the efficacy of these by applying them to specific security ceremonies. As a first step, we deployed a crowd-sourced platform, using both explicit and metaphorical questions, to extract general aspects associated with the perception of the beauty of real-world security mechanisms. This resulted in the identification of four beautification design guidelines. We used these to beautify the following existing security ceremonies: Italian voting, user-to-laptop authentication, password setup and EU premises access. To test the efficacy of our guidelines, we again leveraged crowd-sourcing to determine whether our “beautified” ceremonies were indeed perceived to be more beautiful than the original ones. The results of this initial foray into the beautification of security ceremonies delivered promising results, but must be interpreted carefully
Formal security analysis of registration protocols for interactive systems: a methodology and a case of study
In this work we present and formally analyze CHAT-SRP (CHAos based
Tickets-Secure Registration Protocol), a protocol to provide interactive and
collaborative platforms with a cryptographically robust solution to classical
security issues. Namely, we focus on the secrecy and authenticity properties
while keeping a high usability. In this sense, users are forced to blindly
trust the system administrators and developers. Moreover, as far as we know,
the use of formal methodologies for the verification of security properties of
communication protocols isn't yet a common practice. We propose here a
methodology to fill this gap, i.e., to analyse both the security of the
proposed protocol and the pertinence of the underlying premises. In this
concern, we propose the definition and formal evaluation of a protocol for the
distribution of digital identities. Once distributed, these identities can be
used to verify integrity and source of information. We base our security
analysis on tools for automatic verification of security protocols widely
accepted by the scientific community, and on the principles they are based
upon. In addition, it is assumed perfect cryptographic primitives in order to
focus the analysis on the exchange of protocol messages. The main property of
our protocol is the incorporation of tickets, created using digests of chaos
based nonces (numbers used only once) and users' personal data. Combined with a
multichannel authentication scheme with some previous knowledge, these tickets
provide security during the whole protocol by univocally linking each
registering user with a single request. [..]Comment: 32 pages, 7 figures, 8 listings, 1 tabl
Actor-network procedures: Modeling multi-factor authentication, device pairing, social interactions
As computation spreads from computers to networks of computers, and migrates
into cyberspace, it ceases to be globally programmable, but it remains
programmable indirectly: network computations cannot be controlled, but they
can be steered by local constraints on network nodes. The tasks of
"programming" global behaviors through local constraints belong to the area of
security. The "program particles" that assure that a system of local
interactions leads towards some desired global goals are called security
protocols. As computation spreads beyond cyberspace, into physical and social
spaces, new security tasks and problems arise. As networks are extended by
physical sensors and controllers, including the humans, and interlaced with
social networks, the engineering concepts and techniques of computer security
blend with the social processes of security. These new connectors for
computational and social software require a new "discipline of programming" of
global behaviors through local constraints. Since the new discipline seems to
be emerging from a combination of established models of security protocols with
older methods of procedural programming, we use the name procedures for these
new connectors, that generalize protocols. In the present paper we propose
actor-networks as a formal model of computation in heterogenous networks of
computers, humans and their devices; and we introduce Procedure Derivation
Logic (PDL) as a framework for reasoning about security in actor-networks. On
the way, we survey the guiding ideas of Protocol Derivation Logic (also PDL)
that evolved through our work in security in last 10 years. Both formalisms are
geared towards graphic reasoning and tool support. We illustrate their workings
by analysing a popular form of two-factor authentication, and a multi-channel
device pairing procedure, devised for this occasion.Comment: 32 pages, 12 figures, 3 tables; journal submission; extended
references, added discussio
CALIPER: Continuous Authentication Layered with Integrated PKI Encoding Recognition
Architectures relying on continuous authentication require a secure way to
challenge the user's identity without trusting that the Continuous
Authentication Subsystem (CAS) has not been compromised, i.e., that the
response to the layer which manages service/application access is not fake. In
this paper, we introduce the CALIPER protocol, in which a separate Continuous
Access Verification Entity (CAVE) directly challenges the user's identity in a
continuous authentication regime. Instead of simply returning authentication
probabilities or confidence scores, CALIPER's CAS uses live hard and soft
biometric samples from the user to extract a cryptographic private key embedded
in a challenge posed by the CAVE. The CAS then uses this key to sign a response
to the CAVE. CALIPER supports multiple modalities, key lengths, and security
levels and can be applied in two scenarios: One where the CAS must authenticate
its user to a CAVE running on a remote server (device-server) for access to
remote application data, and another where the CAS must authenticate its user
to a locally running trusted computing module (TCM) for access to local
application data (device-TCM). We further demonstrate that CALIPER can leverage
device hardware resources to enable privacy and security even when the device's
kernel is compromised, and we show how this authentication protocol can even be
expanded to obfuscate direct kernel object manipulation (DKOM) malwares.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2016 Biometrics Worksho
Citizen Electronic Identities using TPM 2.0
Electronic Identification (eID) is becoming commonplace in several European
countries. eID is typically used to authenticate to government e-services, but
is also used for other services, such as public transit, e-banking, and
physical security access control. Typical eID tokens take the form of physical
smart cards, but successes in merging eID into phone operator SIM cards show
that eID tokens integrated into a personal device can offer better usability
compared to standalone tokens. At the same time, trusted hardware that enables
secure storage and isolated processing of sensitive data have become
commonplace both on PC platforms as well as mobile devices.
Some time ago, the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) released the version 2.0 of
the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) specification. We propose an eID architecture
based on the new, rich authorization model introduced in the TCGs TPM 2.0. The
goal of the design is to improve the overall security and usability compared to
traditional smart card-based solutions. We also provide, to the best our
knowledge, the first accessible description of the TPM 2.0 authorization model.Comment: This work is based on an earlier work: Citizen Electronic Identities
using TPM 2.0, to appear in the Proceedings of the 4th international workshop
on Trustworthy embedded devices, TrustED'14, November 3, 2014, Scottsdale,
Arizona, USA, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2666141.266614
The Horcrux Protocol: A Method for Decentralized Biometric-based Self-sovereign Identity
Most user authentication methods and identity proving systems rely on a
centralized database. Such information storage presents a single point of
compromise from a security perspective. If this system is compromised it poses
a direct threat to users' digital identities. This paper proposes a
decentralized authentication method, called the Horcrux protocol, in which
there is no such single point of compromise. The protocol relies on
decentralized identifiers (DIDs) under development by the W3C Verifiable Claims
Community Group and the concept of self-sovereign identity. To accomplish this,
we propose specification and implementation of a decentralized biometric
credential storage option via blockchains using DIDs and DID documents within
the IEEE 2410-2017 Biometric Open Protocol Standard (BOPS)
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