Password reuse is widespread, so a breach of one provider's password database threatens accounts on other providers. When companies find stolen credentials on the black market and notice potential password reuse, they may require a password reset and send affected users a notification. Through two user studies, we provide insight into such notifications. In Study 1, 180 respondents saw one of six representative notifications used by companies in situations potentially involving password reuse. Respondents answered questions about their reactions and understanding of the situation. Notifications differed in the concern they elicited and intended actions they inspired. Concerningly, less than a third of respondents reported intentions to change any passwords. In Study 2, 588 respondents saw one of 15 variations on a model notification synthesizing results from Study 1. While the variations' impact differed in small ways, respondents' intended actions across all notifications would leave them vulnerable to future password-reuse attacks. We discuss best practices for password-reuse notifications and how notifications alone appear insufficient in solving password reuse.
Voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant, or Apple's Siri, have become the primary (voice) interface in smart speakers that can be found in millions of households. For privacy reasons, these speakers analyze every sound in their environment for their respective wake word like "Alexa" or "Hey Siri," before uploading the audio stream to the cloud for further processing. Previous work reported on the inaccurate wake word detection, which can be tricked using similar words or sounds like "cocaine noodles" instead of "OK Google."In this paper, we perform a comprehensive analysis of such accidental triggers, i. e., sounds that should not have triggered the voice assistant, but did. More specifically, we automate the process of finding accidental triggers and measure their prevalence across 11 smart speakers from 8 different manufacturers using everyday media such as TV shows, news, and other kinds of audio datasets. To systematically detect accidental triggers, we describe a method to artificially craft such triggers using a pronouncing dictionary and a weighted, phone-based Levenshtein distance. In total, we have found hundreds of accidental triggers. Moreover, we explore potential gender and language biases and analyze the reproducibility. Finally, we discuss the resulting privacy implications of accidental triggers and explore countermeasures to reduce and limit their impact on users' privacy. To foster additional research on these sounds that mislead machine learning models, we publish a dataset of more than 1000 verified triggers as a research artifact.
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