Markets for Zero-Day Exploits: Ethics and Implications

A New Security Paradigms Workshop (2013) panel discussed the topic of ethical issues and implications related to markets for zero-day exploits, i.e., markets facilitating the sale of previously unknown details on how to exploit software vulnerabilities in target applications or systems. The related topic of vulnerability rewards programs (“bug bounties ” offered by software vendors) was also discussed. This note provides selected background material submitted prior to the panel presentation, and summarizes discussion resulting from the input of both the panelists and NSPW participants

"Sign in with ... Privacy'': Timely Disclosure of Privacy Differences among Web SSO Login Options

The number of login options on web sites has increased since the introduction of web single sign-on (SSO) protocols. Web SSO services allow users to grant web sites or relying parties (RPs) access to their personal profile information from identity provider (IdP) accounts. Many RP sites do not provide sufficient privacy information that could help users make informed login decisions. Moreover, privacy differences in permission requests across login options are largely hidden from users and are time-consuming to manually extract and compare. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of popular RP implementations supporting three major IdP login options (Facebook, Google, and Apple) and categorize RPs in the top 500 sites into four client-side code patterns. Informed by these RP patterns, we design and implement SSOPrivateEye (SPEye), a browser extension prototype that extracts and displays to users permission request information from SSO login options in RPs covering the three IdPs

Influences of Displaying Permission-related Information on Web Single Sign-On Login Decisions

Web users are increasingly presented with multiple login options, including password-based login and common web single sign-on (SSO) login options such as "Login with Google" and "Login with Facebook". There has been little focus in previous studies on how users choose from a list of login options and how to better inform users about privacy issues in web SSO systems. In this paper, we conducted a 200-participant study to understand factors that influence participants' login decisions, and how they are affected by displaying permission differences across login options; permissions in SSO result in release of user personal information to third-party web sites through SSO identity providers. We compare and report on login decisions made by participants before and after viewing permission-related information, examine self-reported responses for reasons related to their login decisions, and report on the factors that motivated their choices. We find that usability preferences and inertia causes (habituation) were among the dominant factors influencing login decisions. After participants viewed permission-related information, many prioritised privacy over other factors, changing their login decisions to more privacy-friendly alternatives. Displaying permission-related information also influenced some participants to make tradeoffs between privacy and usability preferences