Author(s): Kaczmarek, T; Kobsa, A; Sy, R; Tsudik, G | Abstract: User errors while performing security-critical tasks can lead to undesirable or even disastrous consequences. One major factor influencing mistakes and failures is complexity of such tasks, which has been studied extensively in prior research. Another important issue which hardly received any attention is the impact of both accidental and intended distractions on users performing security-critical tasks. In particular, it is unclear whether, and to what extent, unexpected sensory cues (e.g., auditory or visual) can influence user behavior and or trigger mistakes. Better understanding of the effects of intended distractions will help clarify their role in adversarial models. As part of the research effort described in this paper, we administered a range of naturally occurring -- yet unexpected -- sounds while study participants attempted to perform a security-critical task. We found that, although these auditory cues lowered participants' failure rates, they had no discernible effect on their task completion times. To this end, we overview some relevant literature that explains these somewhat counter-intuitive findings. Conducting a thorough and meaningful study on user errors requires a large number of participants, since errors are typically infrequent and should not be instigated more than once per subject. To reduce the effort of running numerous subjects, we developed a novel experimental setup that was fully automated and unattended. We discuss our experience with this setup and highlight the pros and cons of generalizing its usage.
@cite_2 found that performance on out-of-band tasks in secure device pairing could be improved through the addition of a score metric on the user's performance, resulting in a considerable reduction in both safe and fatal errors.
@cite_2
2148165512 15257636 2106044541 1830858207
Secure Device Pairing is the bootstrapping of secure communication between two previously unassociated devices over a wireless channel. The human-imperceptible nature of wireless communication, lack of any prior security context, and absence of a common trust infrastructure open the door for Man-in-the-Middle (aka Evil Twin) attacks. A number of methods have been proposed to mitigate these attacks, each requiring user assistance in authenticating information exchanged over the wireless channel via some human-perceptible auxiliary channels, e.g., visual, acoustic or tactile. In this paper, we present results of the first comprehensive and comparative study of eleven notable secure device pairing methods. Usability measures include: task performance times, ratings on System Usability Scale (SUS), task completion rates, and perceived security. Study subjects were controlled for age, gender and prior experience with device pairing. We present overall results and identify problematic methods for certain classes of users as well as methods best-suited for various device configurations. We explore the use of extrinsic motivation to improve the state of user-centered security mechanisms. Specifically, we study applications of scores as user incentives in the context of secure device pairing. We develop a scoring functionality that can be integrated with traditional pairing approaches. We then report on a usability study that we performed to evaluate the effect of scoring on the performance of users in comparison operations. Our results demonstrate that individuals are likely to commit fewer errors and show more acceptance when working with the scoring based pairing approach. Framing pairing as a game and providing feedback to users in the form of a score is an efficient way to improve pairing security, particularly among users such as children who may not be aware of the consequences of their decisions while performing security tasks. Secure pairing of electronic devices is an important issue that must be addressed in many contexts. In the absence of prior security context, the need to involve the user in the pairing process is a prominent challenge. In this paper, we investigate the use of the audio channel for human-assisted device pairing. First we assume a common (insecure) wireless channel between devices. We then obviate the assumption of a pre-existing common channel with a single-channel device pairing approach only based on audio. Both approaches are applicable to a wide range of devices and place light burden on the user. Author(s): Kaczmarek, T; Kobsa, A; Sy, R; Tsudik, G | Abstract: User errors while performing security-critical tasks can lead to undesirable or even disastrous consequences. One major factor influencing mistakes and failures is complexity of such tasks, which has been studied extensively in prior research. Another important issue which hardly received any attention is the impact of both accidental and intended distractions on users performing security-critical tasks. In particular, it is unclear whether, and to what extent, unexpected sensory cues (e.g., auditory or visual) can influence user behavior and or trigger mistakes. Better understanding of the effects of intended distractions will help clarify their role in adversarial models. As part of the research effort described in this paper, we administered a range of naturally occurring -- yet unexpected -- sounds while study participants attempted to perform a security-critical task. We found that, although these auditory cues lowered participants' failure rates, they had no discernible effect on their task completion times. To this end, we overview some relevant literature that explains these somewhat counter-intuitive findings. Conducting a thorough and meaningful study on user errors requires a large number of participants, since errors are typically infrequent and should not be instigated more than once per subject. To reduce the effort of running numerous subjects, we developed a novel experimental setup that was fully automated and unattended. We discuss our experience with this setup and highlight the pros and cons of generalizing its usage.