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With the increasing popularity of cryptocurrency, many people are interested in cryptocurrency investments, but have so far hesitated. Many others have made investments without adequate preparation. To help interested investors improve their understanding of cryptocurrency and make rational investment decisions, it is important to study their concerns and motivations, and to draw upon experienced investors' experiences and practices. Therefore, we surveyed crypto investors and inexperienced potential investors interested in trading cryptocurrency (n = 395). Our results showed that extreme price volatility is the primary incentive and a substantial obstacle to market participation. Fraud risks, lack of personal funds, insufficient knowledge, and difficulty identifying credible information sources are also common barriers. Our findings highlight the need to build trustworthy exchange platforms and integrate educational features. Based on the reported concerns and experiences, we 1) identify learning components for new investors, and 2) formulate design recommendations for beginner-friendly exchange platforms.

Public key infrastructure (PKI) is the foundation of secure and trusted transactions across the Internet. This paper presents an evaluation of web-based PKI incidents in two parts. We began with a qualitative study where we captured security and policy experts' perceptions of PKI in a set of interviews. We interviewed 18 experts in two conferences who include security academics and practitioners. We describe their perceptions of PKI failures. To evaluate whether perceived failures match real documented failures, we conducted a quantitative analysis of real-world PKI incidents on the web since 2001. Our data comprise reports from Bugzilla, root program operators, academic literature, security blogs, and the popular press. We determined the underlying causes of each and reported the results. We identified a gap between experts' perceptions and real-world PKI incidents. We conclude that there are significant sources of failures of PKI that neither the usability nor traditional computer security community is engaging, nor can arguably engage separately. Specifically, we found incidents illustrate systematic weaknesses of organizational practices that create risks for all who rely upon PKI. More positively, our results also point to organizational and configuration choices that could avoid or mitigate some of these risks. Thus, we also identify immediate mitigation strategies (where feasible).

The on-going COVID-19 pandemic has brought surveillance and privacy concerns to the forefront, given that contact tracing has been seen as a very effective tool to prevent the spread of infectious disease and that public authorities and government officials hope to use it to contain the spread of COVID-19. On the other hand, the rejection of contact tracing tools has also been widely reported, partly due to privacy concerns. We conducted an online survey to identify participants’ privacy concerns and their risk perceptions during the on-going COVID-19 pandemic. Our results contradict media claims that people are more willing to share their private information in a public health crisis. We identified a significant difference depending on the information recipient, the type of device, the intended purpose, and thus concretize the claims rather than suggesting a fundamental difference. We note that participants’ privacy preferences are largely impacted by their perceived autonomy and the perceived severity of consequences related to privacy risks. Contrarily, even during an on-going COVID-19 pandemic, health risk perceptions had limited influence on participants’ privacy preference, given only the perceived newness of the risk could weakly increase their comfort level. Finally, our results show that participants’ computer expertise has a positive influence on their privacy preference while their knowledge to security make them less comfortable with sharing.