HTTPS is one of the most important protocols used to secure communication and is, fortunately, becoming more pervasive. However, especially the long tail of websites is still not sufficiently secured. HTTPS involves different types of users, e.g., end users who are forced to make security decisions when faced with warnings or administrators who are required to deal with cryptographic fundamentals and complex decisions concerning compatibility.In this work, we present the first qualitative study of both end user and administrator mental models of HTTPS. We interviewed 18 end users and 12 administrators; our findings reveal misconceptions about security benefits and threat models from both groups. We identify protocol components that interfere with secure configurations and usage behavior and reveal differences between administrator and end user mental models.Our results suggest that end user mental models are more conceptual while administrator models are more protocol-based. We also found that end users often confuse encryption with authentication, significantly underestimate the security benefits of HTTPS. They also ignore and distrust security indicators while administrators often do not understand the interplay of functional protocol components. Based on the different mental models, we discuss implications and provide actionable recommendations for future designs of user interfaces and protocols.

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It is a well-known fact that the language of IT security experts differs from that of non-security-related people, leading to a multitude of problems. However, very little work has examined the differences in perception between security experts within a single security department or company. The sociological theory of power relations and organizational uncertainties by Croizer and Friedberg suggests that uncertainties about the narratives used in a department can lead to potentially harmful power relations and dissatisfied employees. We conducted a qualitative interview study within two distinct IT security companies in order to research the impact of diverging security narratives within security departments. Our results show that there is indeed an uncertainty about the term IT security. However, one company we interviewed regarded this uncertainty as highly beneficial for team creativity, communication, and mutual education, while the other, more technical-focused company showed few diversions within the security staff, but a possibly uniting conflict with the company’s IT department. Our results suggest that conscious shaping of a zone of uncertainty around the security narrative in the work context can be an important management skill for IT security practitioners. Furthermore, we show that the analysis of language uncertainties provides a powerful approach to studying the motivation of professional security groups.

Users of computer systems are confronted with security dialogs on a regular basis. As demonstrated by previous research, frequent exposure to these dialogs may lead to habituation (i.e., users tend to ignore them). While these previous studies are vital to gaining insights into the human factor, important realworld aspects have been ignored; most notably, not adhering to security dialogs has barely had a negative impact for user study participants. To address this limitation, we replicate and extend previous work on the habituation effect. Our new study design introduces a monetary component in order to refine the study methodology on habituation research. To evaluate our approach, we conducted an online user study (n = 1236) and found a significant effect of monetary loss on the compliance to security dialogs. Overall, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the habituation effect in the context of warning dialogs and provides novel insights into the complexity of ecologically valid risk modeling in user studies.

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.