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

N/A 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.

The SBO 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.

The original SBO collected data from home Windows computers (desktop or laptop). In the past quarter, some of the SBO team has worked with researchers in Japan to develop a Mobile SBO that will allow for similar data collection from mobile devices, allowing for ecologically valid data collection from these devices. Mobile usage has eclipsed desktop usage worldwide since the creation of the SBO [https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet/worldwide/#monthly-201412-202009], so the ability to instrument mobile devices will be essential in the future to obtain a representative snapshot of computing behavior and continue working towards a better understanding of users' everyday security and privacy challenges. A poster on this work was accepted to and presented at SOUPS 2020 in August.

Mobile Security Behavior Observatory: Long-term Monitoring of Mobile User Behavior. Akira Yamada, Shoma Tanaka, Yukiko Sawaya, Ayumu Kubota, So Matsuda, Reo Matsumura, Shun Umemoto, Jun Nakajima, Kyle Crichton, Jin-Dong Dong, and Nicolas Christin. Poster presented remotely at SOUPS 2020. [https://www.usenix.org/conference/soups2020/presentation/yamada]

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENTS

EDUCATIONAL ADVANCES (If Applicable)