With continuous technological advancements, our homes become smarter by interconnecting more and more devices. Smart homes provide many advantages. However, they also introduce new privacy and security risks. Recent studies show that only a few people are aware of abstract risks, and most people are not aware of specific negative consequences. We developed a privacy and security awareness intervention for people who want to inform themselves about risks in the smart home context. Our intervention is based on research literature on risk perception and feedback from both lay users and security and privacy experts. We evaluated our intervention regarding its influence on participants' perceived threat, privacy attitude, motivation to avoid threats, willingness to pay, and time commitment to configure protective measures. The results of this evaluation show a significant increase for all these aspects. We also compared our intervention to information that users could obtain during an Internet search on the topic. In this comparison, our intervention evokes a significantly higher perceived threat and privacy attitude. It showed no significant difference for the other three scales. We discuss our findings in light of related work.

As virtual reality (VR) sees an increase in use in several domains such as retail, education, military; a secure authentication scheme for VR devices is necessary to keep users' personal information safe. A smaller section of research focuses on the authentication schemes of VR devices. To further the understanding of this topic, we conducted a detailed literature review of VR authentication by exploring papers published till October 2020. A total of N = 29 papers were found. While many papers evaluate the accuracy of authentication methods, few conduct detailed user studies. In the user studies done, we found a lack of focus on diverse populations such as the elderly, with the mean age of the participants being 25.11. Our findings from the literature review give a detailed overview of VR-based authentication schemes and highlight trends as well as current research gaps. These findings drive future research direction to create robust and usable authentication strategies.

Immersive technologies, including augmented and virtual reality (AR & VR) devices, have enhanced digital communication along with a considerable increase in digital threats. Thus, authentication becomes critical in AR & VR technology, particularly in shared spaces. In this paper, we propose applying the ZeTA protocol that allows secure authentication even in shared spaces for the AR & VR context. We explain how it can be used with the available interaction methods provided by Head-Mounted Displays. In future work, our research goal is to evaluate different designs of ZeTA (e.g., interaction modes) concerning their usability and users' risk perception regarding their security -while using a crosscultural approach. IntroductionNew-age technologies help to connect people despite geographical constraints. However, such technological evolution brings new risks. Augmented and virtual reality (AR & VR) are such technologies that have expanded considerably and are projected to reach $114 billion and $65 billion, respectively, by 2021 [44]. AR & VR systems like the Oculus and Google Glass increasingly promise to provide social activities like interactive gaming, virtual shopping, or attending virtual meetings [46]. Many of these activities happen in so-called shared spaces, i.e., places not strictly public, but where multiple people are present at the same time [22]. However, these technologies also introduce new security challenges in AR & VR [24], including authentication challenges. Nowadays, authentication on AR & VR systems is neglected or carried out on the smartphone or PC [6]. Yet, if authentication is required during a VR experience, e.g., paying for a product

No abstract

No abstract