Characterizing user behavior and anticipating its effects on computer security with a Security Behavior Observatory - January 2020

PI(s), Co-PI(s), Researchers:

Lorrie Cranor, Nicolas Christin

Researchers: Sarah Pearman, Jeremy Thomas

HARD PROBLEM(S) ADDRESSED
This refers to Hard Problems, released November 2012.

The Security Behavior Observatory addresses the hard problem of "Understanding and Accounting for Human Behavior" by collecting data directly from people's own home computers, thereby capturing people's computing behavior "in the wild". This data is the closest to the ground truth of the users' everyday security and privacy challenges that the research community has ever collected. We expect the insights discovered by analyzing this data will profoundly impact multiple research domains, including but not limited to behavioral sciences, computer security & privacy, economics, and human-computer interaction.

PUBLICATIONS

• No new publications in this quarter

PUBLIC ACCOMPLISHMENT HIGHLIGHTS

The purpose is to give our immediate sponsors a body of evidence that the funding they are providing is delivering results that "more than justify" the investment they are making.

We submitted some papers in the previous quarter, but none were accepted, so we are working on revising those papers to resubmit them elsewhere in 2020.

We also analyzed results from an optional exit survey that we offered to participants when we ended data collection this summer, and we are drafting a report using those results that we plan to submit to a magazine or workshop in 2020.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENTS

EDUCATIONAL ADVANCES (If Applicable)