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355
Phoolproof Phishing Prevention
- PROCEEDINGS OF THE FINANCIAL CRYPTOGRAPHY AND DATA SECURITY 10TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE (FC '06)
, 2006
"... Phishing, or web spoofing, is a growing problem: the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) received almost 14,000 unique phishing reports in August 2005, a 56% jump over the number of reports in December 2004 [3]. For financial institutions, phishing is a particularly insidious problem, since trust for ..."
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Cited by 54 (3 self)
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Phishing, or web spoofing, is a growing problem: the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) received almost 14,000 unique phishing reports in August 2005, a 56% jump over the number of reports in December 2004 [3]. For financial institutions, phishing is a particularly insidious problem, since trust forms the foundation for customer relationships, and phishing attacks undermine confidence in an institution. Phishing attacks succeed by exploiting a user’s inability to distinguish legitimate sites from spoofed sites. Most prior research focuses on assisting the user in making this distinction; however, users must make the right security decision every time. Unfortunately, humans are ill-suited for performing the security checks necessary for secure site identification, and a single mistake may result in a total compromise of the user’s online account. Fundamentally, users should be authenticated using information that they cannot readily reveal to malicious parties. Placing less reliance on the user during the authentication process will enhance security and eliminate many forms of fraud. We propose using a trusted device to perform mutual authentication that eliminates reliance on perfect user behavior, thwarts Man-in-the-Middle attacks after setup, and protects a user’s account even in the presence of keyloggers and most forms of spyware. We demonstrate the practicality of our system with a prototype implementation.
Privacy in Multimedia Communications: Protecting Users, Not Just Data
- IN
, 2001
"... ... This paper addresses the problem by providing a model of user perceptions of privacy in multimedia environments. The model has been derived from an analysis of empirical studies conducted by the authors and other researchers and aids designers to determine which information users regard as pri ..."
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Cited by 46 (6 self)
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... This paper addresses the problem by providing a model of user perceptions of privacy in multimedia environments. The model has been derived from an analysis of empirical studies conducted by the authors and other researchers and aids designers to determine which information users regard as private, and in which context. It also identifies trade-offs that users are willing to make rendering some privacy risks acceptable. To demonstrate how this model can be used to assess the privacy implications of multimedia communications in a specific context, an example of the models application for a specific usage scenario is provided.
So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users
"... It is often suggested that users are hopelessly lazy and unmotivated on security questions. They chose weak passwords, ignore security warnings, and are oblivious to certificates errors. We argue that users ’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspec ..."
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Cited by 45 (1 self)
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It is often suggested that users are hopelessly lazy and unmotivated on security questions. They chose weak passwords, ignore security warnings, and are oblivious to certificates errors. We argue that users ’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspective. The advice offers to shield them from the direct costs of attacks, but burdens them with far greater indirect costs in the form of effort. Looking at various examples of security advice we find that the advice is complex and growing, but the benefit is largely speculative or moot. For example, much of the advice concerning passwords is outdated and does little to address actual threats, and fully 100 % of certificate error warnings appear to be false positives. Further, if users spent even a minute a day reading URLs to avoid phishing, the cost (in terms of user time) would be two orders of magnitude greater than all phishing losses. Thus we find that most security advice simply offers a poor cost-benefit tradeoff to users and is rejected. Security advice is a daily burden, applied to the whole population, while an upper bound on the benefit is the harm suffered by the fraction that become victims annually. When that fraction is small, designing security advice that is beneficial is very hard. For example, it makes little sense to burden all users with a daily task to spare 0.01 % of them a modest annual pain.
Computer security impaired by legitimate users
- Computers & Security
, 2004
"... Abstract. Computer security has traditionally been assessed from a technical point of view. One other view is about the role played by legitimate users of systems in impairing the level of protection. In order to address this issue, we wish to adopt a multidisciplinary standpoint and investigate som ..."
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Abstract. Computer security has traditionally been assessed from a technical point of view. One other view is about the role played by legitimate users of systems in impairing the level of protection. In order to address this issue, we wish to adopt a multidisciplinary standpoint and investigate some of the human aspects involved in computer security. From research in psychology, it is known that people make biased decisions. They sometimes overlook rules in order to gain maximum benefits for the cost of a given action. This situation leads to insidious security lapses whereby the level of protection is traded-off against usability. In this paper, we highlight the cognitive processes underlying such security impairments. At the end of the paper, we propose a short usability-centered set of recommendations.
Improving Text Passwords Through Persuasion
- SYMPOSIUM ON USABLE PRIVACY AND SECURITY (SOUPS) 2008
, 2008
"... Password restriction policies and advice on creating secure passwords have limited effects on password strength. Influencing users to create more secure passwords remains an open problem. We have developed Persuasive Text Passwords (PTP), a text password creation system which leverages Persuasive Te ..."
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Cited by 44 (13 self)
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Password restriction policies and advice on creating secure passwords have limited effects on password strength. Influencing users to create more secure passwords remains an open problem. We have developed Persuasive Text Passwords (PTP), a text password creation system which leverages Persuasive Technology principles to influence users in creating more secure passwords without sacrificing usability. After users choose a password during creation, PTP improves its security by placing randomly-chosen characters at random positions into the password. Users may shuffle to be presented with randomly-chosen and positioned characters until they find a combination they feel is memorable. In this paper, we present an 83-participant user study testing four PTP variations. Our results show that the PTP variations significantly improved the security of users ’ passwords. We also found that those participants who had a high number of random characters placed into their passwords would deliberately choose weaker pre-improvement passwords to compensate for the memory load. As a consequence of this compensatory behaviour, there was a limit to the gain in password security achieved by PTP.
Teaching Johnny not to fall for phish
- ACM Trans. Internet Technol
, 2010
"... Phishing attacks, in which criminals lure Internet users to websites that spoof legitimate websites, are occurring with increasing frequency and are causing considerable harm to victims. While a great deal of effort has been devoted to solving the phishing problem by prevention and detection of phis ..."
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Cited by 41 (15 self)
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Phishing attacks, in which criminals lure Internet users to websites that spoof legitimate websites, are occurring with increasing frequency and are causing considerable harm to victims. While a great deal of effort has been devoted to solving the phishing problem by prevention and detection of phishing emails and phishing websites, little research has been done in the area of training users to recognize those attacks. Our research focuses on educating users about phishing and helping them make better trust decisions. We identified a number of challenges for end-user security education in general and anti-phishing education in particular: users are not motivated to learn about security; for most users, security is a secondary task; it is difficult to teach people to identify security threats without also increasing their tendency to misjudge non-threats as threats. Keeping these challenges in mind, we developed an email-based anti-phishing education system called “PhishGuru ” and an online game called “Anti-Phishing Phil ” that teaches users how to use cues in URLs to avoid falling for phishing attacks. We applied learning science instructional principles in the design of PhishGuru and Anti-Phishing Phil. In this paper we present the results of PhishGuru and Anti-Phishing Phil user studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of these tools. Our results suggest that, while automated detection systems should be used as the first line of defense against phishing attacks, user education offers a complementary approach to help people better recognize fraudulent emails and websites.
Do Strong Web Passwords Accomplish Anything?
"... We find that traditional password advice given to users is somewhat dated. Strong passwords do nothing to protect online users from password stealing attacks such as phishing and keylogging, and yet they place considerable burden on users. Passwords that are too weak of course invite brute-force att ..."
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Cited by 39 (9 self)
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We find that traditional password advice given to users is somewhat dated. Strong passwords do nothing to protect online users from password stealing attacks such as phishing and keylogging, and yet they place considerable burden on users. Passwords that are too weak of course invite brute-force attacks. However, we find that relatively weak passwords, about 20 bits or so, are sufficient to make brute-force attacks on a single account unrealistic so long as a “three strikes ” type rule is in place. Above that minimum it appears that increasing password strength does little to address any real threat. If a larger credential space is needed it appears better to increase the strength of the userID’s rather than the passwords. For large institutions this is just as effective in deterring bulk guessing attacks and is a great deal better for users. For small institutions there appears little reason to require strong passwords for online accounts. 1.
Intentional access management: Making access control usable for end-users
- In Sumposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS
, 2006
"... The usability of access control mechanisms in modern distributed systems has been widely criticized but little studied. In this paper, we carefully examine one such widely deployed access control mechanism, the one embedded in the WebDAV standard, from the point-of-view of an end-user trying to deci ..."
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Cited by 38 (1 self)
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The usability of access control mechanisms in modern distributed systems has been widely criticized but little studied. In this paper, we carefully examine one such widely deployed access control mechanism, the one embedded in the WebDAV standard, from the point-of-view of an end-user trying to decide how to grant or deny access to some resource to a third party. This analysis points to problems with the conceptual usability of the system. Significant effort is required on the part of the user to determine how to implement the desired access rules; the user, however, has low interest and expertise in this task, given that such access management actions are almost always secondary to the collaborative task at hand. The analysis does however indicate a possible solution: to recast the access control puzzle as a decision support problem in which user intentions (i.e. the descriptions of desired system outputs) are interpreted by an access mediator that either automatically or semi-automatically decides how to achieve the designated goals and provides enough feedback to the user. We call such systems intentional access management (IAM) systems and describe them in both specific and general terms. To demonstrate the feasibility and usability of the proposed IAM models, we develop an intentional access management prototype for WebDAV. The results of a user study conducted on the system show its superior usability compared to traditional access management tools like the access control list editor. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.4.6 [Operating Systems]: Security and Protection – access controls. H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems
The Password Thicket: technical and market failures in human authentication on the web
- 9TH WORKSHOP ON THE ECONOMICS OF INFO SECURITY (WEIS 2010)
, 2010
"... We report the results of the first large-scale empirical analysis of password implementations deployed on the Internet. Our study included 150 websites which offer free user accounts for a variety of purposes, including the most popular destinations on the web and a random sample of e-commerce, news ..."
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Cited by 37 (10 self)
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We report the results of the first large-scale empirical analysis of password implementations deployed on the Internet. Our study included 150 websites which offer free user accounts for a variety of purposes, including the most popular destinations on the web and a random sample of e-commerce, news, and communication websites. Although all sites evaluated relied on user-chosen textual passwords for authentication, we found many subtle but important technical variations in implementation with important security implications. Many poor practices were commonplace,
such as a lack of encryption to protect transmitted passwords, storage of cleartext passwords in server databases, and little protection of passwords from brute force attacks. While a spectrum of implementation quality exists with a general correlation between implementation choices within more-secure and less-secure websites, we find a surprising number of inconsistent choices within
individual sites, suggesting that the lack of a standards is harming security. We observe numerous ways in which the technical failures of lower-security sites can compromise higher-security sites due to the well-established tendency of users to re-use passwords. Our data confirms that the worst security practices are indeed found at sites with few security incentives, such as newspaper websites, while sites storing more sensitive information such as payment details or user communication implement more password security. From an economic viewpoint, password insecurity is a negative externality that the market has been unable to correct, undermining the viability of password-based
authentication. We also speculate that some sites deploying passwords do so primarily for psychological reasons, both as a justification for collecting marketing data and as a way to build trusted relationships with customers. This theory suggests that efforts to replace passwords with moresecure protocols or federated identity systems may fail because they don’t recreate the entrenched ritual of password authentication.
The security of modern password expiration: an algorithmic framework and empirical analysis
- in Proc. CCS
, 2010
"... This paper presents the first large-scale study of the success of password expiration in meeting its intended purpose, namely revoking access to an account by an attacker who has captured the account’s password. Using a dataset of over 7700 accounts, we assess the extent to which passwords that user ..."
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Cited by 37 (0 self)
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This paper presents the first large-scale study of the success of password expiration in meeting its intended purpose, namely revoking access to an account by an attacker who has captured the account’s password. Using a dataset of over 7700 accounts, we assess the extent to which passwords that users choose to replace expired ones pose an obstacle to the attacker’s continued access. We develop a framework by which an attacker can search for a user’s new password from an old one, and design an efficient algorithm to build an approximately optimal search strategy. We then use this strategy to measure the difficulty of breaking newly chosen passwords from old ones. We believe our study calls into question the merit of continuing the practice of password expiration. Categories andSubject Descriptors
