Privacy is the most often-cited criticism of ubiquitous computing, and may be the greatest barrier to its long-term success. However, developers currently have little support in designing software architectures and in creating interactions that are effective in helping end-users manage their privacy. To address this problem, we present Confab, a toolkit for facilitating the development of privacy-sensitive ubiquitous computing applications. The requirements for Confab were gathered through an analysis of privacy needs for both end-users and application developers. Confab provides basic support for building ubiquitous computing applications, providing a framework as well as several customizable privacy mechanisms. Confab also comes with extensions for managing location privacy. Combined, these features allow application developers and end-users to support a spectrum of trust levels and privacy needs.

Security toolbars in a web browser show security-related information about a website to help users detect phishing attacks. Because the toolbars are designed for humans to use, they should be evaluated for usability – that is, whether these toolbars really prevent users from being tricked into providing personal information. We conducted two user studies of three security toolbars and other browser security indicators and found them all ineffective at preventing phishing attacks. Even though subjects were asked to pay attention to the toolbar, many failed to look at it; others disregarded or explained away the toolbars ’ warnings if the content of web pages looked legitimate. We found that many subjects do not understand phishing attacks or realize how sophisticated such attacks can be.

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Computer security protocols usually terminate in a computer; however, the human-based services which they support usually terminate in a human. The gap between the human and the computer creates potential for security problems. We examine this gap, as it is manifested in secure Web servers. Felten et al. demonstrated the potential, in 1996, for malicious servers to impersonate honest servers. In this paper, we show how malicious servers can still do this—and can also forge the existence of an SSL session and the contents of the alleged server certificate. We then consider how to systematically defend against Web spoofing, by creating a trusted path from the browser to the human user. We present potential designs, propose a new one, prototype it in open-source Mozilla, and demonstrate its effectiveness via user studies.

There are a variety of ways to ensure the security of data and the integrity of data transfer, depending on the set of anticipated attacks, the level of security desired by data owners, and the level of inconvenience users are willing to tolerate. Current storage systems secure data either by encrypting data on the wire, or by encrypting data on the disk. These systems seem very different, and currently there are no common parameters for comparing them. In this paper we propose a framework in which both types of systems can be evaluated along the security and performance axes. In particular, we show that all of the existing systems merely make different trade-offs along a single continuum and among a set of related security primitives. We use a trace from a time-sharing UNIX server used by a medium-sized workgroup to quantify the costs associated with each of these secure storage systems. We show that encrypt-on-disk systems offer both increased security and improved performance over encrypt-on-wire in the traced environment. 1

Dichotomies between privacy attitudes and behavior have been noted in the literature but not yet fully explained. We apply lessons from the research on behavioral economics to understand the individual decision making process with respect to privacy in electronic commerce. We show that it is unrealistic to expect individual rationality in this context. Models of self-control problems and immediate gratification offer more realistic descriptions of the decision process and are more consistent with currently available data. In particular, we show why individuals who may genuinely want to protect their privacy might not do so because of psychological distortions well documented in the behavioral literature; we show that these distortions may affect not only `naïve' individuals but also `sophisticated' ones; and we prove that this may occur also when individuals perceive the risks from not protecting their privacy as significant.

Ubiquitous and mobile technologies create new challenges for system security. Effective security solutions depend not only on the mathematical and technical properties of those solutions, but also on people’s ability to understand them and use them as part of their work. As a step towards solving this problem, we have been examining how people experience security as a facet of their daily life, and how they routinely answer the question, “is this system secure enough for what I want to do?” We present a number of findings concerning the scope of security, attitudes towards security, and the social and organizational contexts within which security concerns arise, and point towards emerging technical solutions.

In the past, research on password mechanisms has focussed almost entirely on technical issues. Only in recent years has the security research community acknowledged that user behavior plays a part in many security failures, and that policies alone may not be sufficient to ensure correct behavior. We argue that password mechanisms and their users form a socio-technical system, whose effectiveness relies strongly on users' willingness to make the extra effort that security-conscious behavior requires. In most organizations, users cannot be forced to comply; rather, they have to be persuaded to do so. Ultimately, the mechanisms themselves, policies, tutorials, training and the general discourse have to be designed with their persuasive power in mind. We present the results of a first study that can guide such persuasive efforts, and describe methods that can be used to persuade users to employ proper password practice.

Securing data is more important than ever. As the Internet has become more pervasive, security attacks have

We present a usability study of two recent password manager