Open Access Published by Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag

Volume 18 Issue 3 - Special Issue "Emerging Trends in Usable Security and Privacy"

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Contents
Journal Overview

Publicly Available January 14, 2020

Frontmatter

Page range: I-V

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Introduction to the Special Issue

Publicly Available January 14, 2020

Emerging Trends in Usable Security and Privacy

Florian Alt, Emanuel von Zezschwitz

Page range: 189-195

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Abstract

New technologies are constantly becoming part of our everyday life. At the same time, designers and developers still often do not consider the implications of their design choices on security and privacy. For example, new technologies generate sensitive data, enable access to sensitive data, or can be used in malicious ways. This creates a need to fundamentally rethink the way in which we design new technologies. While some of the related opportunities and challenges have been recognized and are being addressed by the community, there is still a need for a more holistic understanding. In this editorial, we will address this by (1) providing a brief historical overview on the research field of ‘Usable Security and Privacy’; (2) deriving a number of current and future trends; and (3) briefly introducing the articles that are part of this special issue and describing how they relate to the current trends and what researchers and practitioners can learn from them.

Special Issue Research Articles

Publicly Available January 14, 2020

Assessing Users’ Privacy and Security Concerns of Smart Home Technologies

Verena Zimmermann, Paul Gerber, Karola Marky, Leon Böck, Florian Kirchbuchner

Page range: 197-216

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Abstract

Smart Home technologies have the potential to increase the quality of life, home security and facilitate elderly care. Therefore, they require access to a plethora of data about the users’ homes and private lives. Resulting security and privacy concerns form a relevant barrier to adopting this promising technology. Aiming to support end users’ informed decision-making through addressing the concerns we first conducted semi-structured interviews with 42 potential and little-experienced Smart Home users. Their diverse concerns were clustered into four themes that center around attacks on Smart Home data and devices, the perceived loss of control, the trade-off between functionality and security, and user-centric concerns as compared to concerns on a societal level. Second, we discuss measures to address the four themes from an interdisciplinary perspective. The paper concludes with recommendations for addressing user concerns and for supporting developers in designing user-centered Smart Home technologies.

Publicly Available January 14, 2020

“Get a Free Item Pack with Every Activation!”

Do Incentives Increase the Adoption Rates of Two-Factor Authentication?

Karoline Busse, Sabrina Amft, Daniel Hecker, Emanuel von Zezschwitz

Page range: 217-236

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Abstract

Account security is an ongoing issue in practice. Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) is a mechanism which could help mitigate this problem, however adoption is not very high in most domains. Online gaming has adopted an interesting approach to drive adoption: Games offer small rewards such as visual modifications to the player’s avatar’s appearance, if players utilize 2FA. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of these incentives and investigate how they can be applied to non-gaming contexts. We conducted two surveys, one recruiting gamers and one recruiting from a general population. In addition, we conducted three focus group interviews to evaluate various incentive designs for both, the gaming context and the non-gaming context. We found that visual modifications, which are the most popular type of gaming-related incentives, are not as popular in non-gaming contexts. However, our design explorations indicate that well-chosen incentives have the potential to lead to more users adopting 2FA, even outside of the gaming context.

Publicly Available January 14, 2020

CogniPGA: Longitudinal Evaluation of Picture Gesture Authentication with Cognition-Based Intervention

Christina Katsini, Nikolaos Avouris, Christos Fidas

Page range: 237-257

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Abstract

There is evidence that the visual behavior of users when creating graphical passwords affects the password strength. Adopting a cognitive style perspective in the interpretation of the results of recent studies revealed that users, depending on their cognitive style, follow different visual exploration paths when creating graphical passwords which affected the password strength. To take advantage of the inherent abilities of people, we proposed CogniPGA , a cued-recall graphical authentication scheme where a cognition-based intervention using gaze data is applied. This paper presents the longitudinal evaluation of the proposed scheme in terms of security, memorability, and usability from a cognitive style perspective. Results strengthen the assumptions that understanding and using the inherent cognitive characteristics of users could enable the design of user-first authentication schemes, where no compromises need to be made on security for benefiting usability or the other way around.

Publicly Available January 14, 2020

VPID: Towards Vein Pattern Identification Using Thermal Imaging

Sarah Faltaous, Jonathan Liebers, Yomna Abdelrahman, Florian Alt, Stefan Schneegass

Page range: 259-270

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Abstract

Biometric authentication received considerable attention lately. The vein pattern on the back of the hand is a unique biometric that can be measured through thermal imaging. Detecting this pattern provides an implicit approach that can authenticate users while interacting. In this paper, we present the Vein-Identification system, called VPID. It consists of a vein pattern recognition pipeline and an authentication part. We implemented six different vein-based authentication approaches by combining thermal imaging and computer vision algorithms. Through a study, we show that the approaches achieve a low false-acceptance rate (“FAR”) and a low false-rejection rate (“FRR”). Our findings show that the best approach is the Hausdorff distance-difference applied in combination with a Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) classification of stacked images.

Research Articles

Publicly Available January 14, 2020

Why Do People Use Digital Applications? A Qualitative Analysis of Usage Goals and Psychological Need Fulfillment

Sina Zimmermann, Nina Gerber

Page range: 271-285

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Abstract

For many people, digital applications, especially messengers, social networks and cloud services, have become an important part of their daily life. Although most users express privacy concerns regarding the use of digital applications, their concerns do not prevent users from sharing personal information with such applications. A reason for this seemingly paradoxical behavior could be that users pursue certain goals when they are using these applications, which possibly overweigh their privacy concerns. We thus conducted semi-structured interviews with 17 users, with most of them being psychology students, to investigate why they use digital applications (i. e., messengers, social networks, cloud services, digital assistants, and Smart TVs) and what psychological needs they aim to fulfill by using these applications. Our study further included a card sorting task, in which the participants ranked the relevance of ten psychological needs for each of the investigated digital applications they reported to use. Using open coding for the analysis of the interview questions, and a quantitative analysis of the card sorting task, we identified four main psychological needs people aim to fulfill by using digital applications: (1) relatedness-belongingness , (2) competence-effectance , (3) pleasure-stimulation , and (4) autonomy-independence , and four additional psychological needs which are application-specific: (5) security , (6) popularity-influence , (7) self-actualization-meaning , and (8) money-luxury . Besides this, we identified several concerns (e. g., data abuse, privacy invasion, and eavesdropping) and reasons why people refrain from using certain digital applications (i. e., the lack of benefits, malfunction, high costs, and the fear of being eavesdropped on). The fulfillment of the psychological needs seem to overweigh those privacy concerns and play a major role for people’s intention to use digital applications, which is why users will not use alternative privacy friendly applications if these do not allow for the fulfillment of those needs in the same way established applications do.

Publicly Available January 14, 2020

User-Centered Development of Smart Glasses Support for Skills Training in Nursing Education

Jan Patrick Kopetz, Daniel Wessel, Nicole Jochems

Page range: 287-299

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Abstract

An ageing society creates an increasing need for a well-trained nursing staff. In particular, physically demanding motion sequences must be learned correctly to preserve carers’ long-term health. During training, support in practical skills training must also leave the carers’ hands free to allow them to perform the motion sequences unencumbered. Wearables might provide the necessary information “hands-free” and thus support skills training. In this paper, we present and discuss a User-Centered Design approach conducted with nursing students to determine the suitability of smart glasses support for skills training in nursing education. This User-Centered Design process consisted of a survey, two design thinking workshops, and a summative evaluation of a high-fidelity prototype. The developed smart glasses application was well evaluated and is usable for training purposes.

Brief Report

Publicly Available January 14, 2020

OMG I’m Laughing so Hard – Alienation in Digital Communication and Potential Countermeasures

Cedric Quintes, Daniel Ullrich

Page range: 301-307

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Abstract

Nowadays communication is largely dominated by digital text-based channels which naturally only transfer a small part of the information that is present in face-to-face conversations. In particular, information about the communication partner’s emotional state, which is naturally expressed through facial expressions, body language and other non-verbal indicators, can hardly be transferred. Approaches such as emojis address this issue by allowing the sender to show how he (for reasons of readability, the pronoun “he” addresses all genders equally) feels by selecting an appropriate (smiley) face. However, the crucial difference is that this smiley must be deliberately chosen and does not necessarily represent an authentic expression of the sender’s emotional state. The present paper discusses typical challenges and misunderstandings of communication in the digital era by the example of chat communication. It reflects its ramifications on the perceived authenticity of the transferred emotions and discusses possible (technology-based) approaches towards a more direct, authentic way of communication.

Nachruf

Publicly Available January 14, 2020

Nachruf: MCI-Pionier Peter Gorny ist gestorben

Horst Oberquelle

Page range: 309-309

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News

Publicly Available January 14, 2020

Mensch und Computer 2019 in Hamburg

Frank Steinicke, Katrin Wolf

Page range: 313-314

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About this journal

Objective
This journal is devoted to human-computer interaction, media design, usability, engineering and systems evaluation, software ergonomics, cooperative systems, e-learning, mobile and ubiquitous systems, user-adaptive systems, agent development tools and methods for media in different application fields (including e-business, knowledge management, leisure and entertainment, transport, engineering, and medicine), barrier-free systems design, and the social aspects of information and communication technologies.

The journal seeks to build bridges between research and practice as well as between teaching and business, emphasizing interdisciplinary teamwork and application-oriented solutions.

The journal is the official organ of the special interest group on "Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)" in the German Association for Informatics (GI).

i-com is an open access journal since 2023. It publishes English-language articles only. The publication frequency is three times per year.

Topics

Computer science
Psychology
Media design
Marketing/branding
Sociology
Business management
Labor and organizational studies

Article formats
Expert research, review articles, and brief reports