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The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life. The great benefits of the Internet also come with potential risks, security issues, and privacy concerns. Internet security products are usually employed to inform users about security incidents. There are three major problems using these security products: (1) these tools often overwhelm users with a great many features making their usability a serious issue, (2) these tools are not always accessible to every type of user such as those who are visually impaired, and (3) most of the Internet users are unfamiliar with various types of security threats and thus their impacts.
This project translates security warnings and threats into various forms of sounds. The introduced user-centric sonification takes a security warning and maps out the risks and consequences associated with the underlying security threat into a certain type of sound that reflects the emotional feelings of the potential risks and harm caused by the threat. The project builds a repository of sounds tagged with their emotional impacts such as fear, happiness, and sadness. The project also builds a second repository of security threats tagged with similar emotional impacts such as fear of loss of sensitive information, impersonation, and privacy exposure. The intellectual merit of this project includes introduction of a user-centric sonification framework in which a cyber threat, along with its risks, severities, and impacts to users, is mapped out to a representative sound that reflects the emotional impacts of the threat to the user. The sonified security warnings undergo extensive usability testing in order to assess the effectiveness of the sonified security threats. The broader impact of this sonification project includes introduction of two repositories of possible sounds and security attacks tagged with their emotional impacts. The constructed repositories can be useful for music and computer security industries such as Amazon, anti-virus software developers, and producers of major Web browsers. The sonification-based technology for translating security warnings to sounds can be integrated into any popular Internet Web browsers. The project will have direct impact on the development of technologies that enhance accessibility for Internet users who are visually impaired and will increase their Internet safety.
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SBE: Medium: User-Centric Design of a Sonification System for Automatically Alarming Security Threats and Impact