Exploring Website Location as a Security Indicator

Abstract

Authenticating websites is an ongoing problem for users. Recent proposals have suggested strengthening current server authentication methods by incorporating website location as a comprehensible additional trust factor. In this work, we explore users' acceptance of location information and how it affects decision-making for security and privacy. We conducted a series of qualitative interviews to learn how location can be integrated into users' decision-making for security, and we designed a security indicator to alert the user to changes in website locations. We evaluated our tool in a 44-participant user study and found that users were less likely to perform securitysensitive tasks when alerted to location changes. Our results suggest that website location can be used as an effective indicator for users' security assessments.