Category: Publications

AbstractAugmented reality (AR), and specifically mobile augmented reality (MAR), gained much public attention after the success of Pokémon Go in 2016, and since then has found application in online games, social media, entertainment, real estate, interior design, and other services. MAR apps are highly dependent on real time context-specific information provided by the different sensors […]

Benjamin Andow, Samin Yaseer Mahmud, Justin Whitaker, William Enck, Bradley Reaves, Kapil Singh, and Serge Egelman. Actions Speak Louder than Words: Entity-Sensitive Privacy Policy and Data Flow Analysis with POLICHECK. In Proceedings of the 29th USENIX Security Symposium. USENIX Assoc., Berkeley, CA, USA. 2020.

AbstractTwo-Factor Authentication (2FA) hardens an organization against user account compromise, but adds an extra step to organizations’ mission-critical tasks. We investigate to what extent quantitative analysis of operational logs of 2FA systems both supports and challenges recent results from user studies and surveys identifying usability challenges in 2FA systems. Using tens of millions of logs […]

AbstractOrganizational security teams have begun to specialize, and as a result, the existence of red, blue, and purple teams have been used as signals for an organization’s security maturity. There is also now a rise in the use of third-party contractors who offer services such as incident response or penetration testing. Additionally, bug bounty programs […]

AbstractPrivacy expectations during disasters differ significantly from nonemergency situations. This paper explores the actual privacy practices of popular disaster apps, highlighting location information flows. Our empirical study compares content analysis of privacy policies and government agency policies, structured by the contextual integrity framework, with static and dynamic app analysis documenting the personal data sent by […]

AbstractIntelligent voice assistants (IVAs) and other voice-enabled devices already form an integral component of the Internet of Things and will continue to grow in popularity. As their capabilities evolve, they will move beyond relying on the wake-words today’s IVAs use, engaging instead in continuous listening. Though potentially useful, the continuous recording and analysis of speech […]

AbstractNudges are simple and effective interventions that alter the architecture in which people make choices in order to help them make decisions that could benefit themselves or society. For many years, researchers and practitioners have used online nudges to encourage users to choose stronger and safer passwords. However, the effects of such nudges have been […]

AbstractCompared to other organizations, civil society organizations (CSOs) often operate in elevated-risk contexts, and attacks against them carry much greater ramifications, including threats to freedom of expression, liberty, and life. We aim to capture the factors that affect the attitudes and intentions of CSO employees to engage in security and privacy behaviors by using a […]

AbstractIt is commonly assumed that “free” mobile apps come at the cost of consumer privacy and that paying for apps could offer consumers protection from behavioral advertising and long-term tracking. This work empirically evaluates the validity of this assumption by comparing the privacy practices of free apps and their paid premium versions, while also gauging […]

AbstractMany consumers now rely on different forms of voice assistants, both stand-alone devices and those built into smartphones. Currently, these systems react to specific wake-words, such as “Alexa,” “Siri,” or “Ok Google.” However, with advancements in natural language processing, the next generation of voice assistants could instead always listen to the acoustic environment and proactively […]