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_7 reported on a comprehensive comparative usability study of eleven major secure device pairing methods, measuring task performance times, task completion rates, perceived security and perceived usability. The main outcome was the grouping of the investigated methods into three clusters, following a principal components analysis.
@cite_7
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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.