There is growing recognition that technology alone will not provide
all of the solutions to security and privacy problems. Human factors
play an important role in these areas, and it is important for
security and privacy experts to have an understanding of how
people will interact with the systems they develop. This course is
designed to introduce students to a variety of usability and user
interface problems related to privacy and security and to give them
experience in designing studies aimed at helping to evaluate usability
issues in security and privacy systems. The course is suitable both
for students interested in privacy and security who would like to
learn more about usability, as well as for students interested in
usability who would like to learn more about security and
privacy. Much of the course will be taught in a graduate seminar
style in which all students will be expected to do a weekly reading
assignment and each week different students will prepare a
presentation for the class. Students will also work on a group project
throughout the semester.
Readings will be assigned from the following text (available in the
CMU bookstore and from all the usual online stores). Additional
readings will be assigned from papers available online or handed
out in class.
J. Johnston, J. H. P. Eloff and L. Labuschagne. Security and human computer interfaces. Computers & Security
Volume 22, Issue 8, December 2003, Pages 675-684.
All students who have not completed human
subjects training should do so this week and submit a copy
of their certificate
(counts as one homework).
Week 3 (January 28, 30): Introduction to privacy / UI design and evaluation
Giovanni Iachello Jason Hong (2007) "End-User Privacy in Human-Computer Interaction",
Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction: Vol. 1: No 1, pp 1-137.
http:/dx.doi.org/10.1561/1100000004
Brustoloni, J. C. and Villamarin-Salomon, R. 2007. Improving security decisions with polymorphic and audited dialogs. In Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 18 - 20, 2007). SOUPS '07, vol. 229. ACM, New York, NY, 76-85. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1280680.1280691
Week 4 (February 4, 6): Introduction to HCI methods and security
February 4: Introduction to HCI methods - Guest speaker, Brad Myers [slides]
February 6: Introduction to security - Guest speaker, Lujo Bauer [slides]
Reading assignment:
Chapter 4 Usability Design and
Evaluation for Privacy and Security Solutions
Chapter 17 Simple Desktop Security
with Chameleon
Chapter 27 Creating Usable Security Products for Consumers
Nielsen, J. and Molich, R. 1990. Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Empowering People (Seattle, Washington, United States, April 01 - 05, 1990). J. C. Chew and J. Whiteside, Eds. CHI '90. ACM, New York, NY, 249-256. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/97243.97281
W. Keith Edwards, Erika Shehan and Jennifer Stoll, Security Automation Considered Harmful?Proceedings of the IEEE New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW 2007). White Mountain, New Hampshire. September 18-21, 2007.
Week 5 (February 11, 13): User studies / Project group formation
Iachello, G., Truong, K. N., Abowd, G. D., Hayes, G. R., and Stevens, M. 2006. Prototyping and sampling experience to evaluate ubiquitous computing privacy in the real world. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montreal, Quebec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006). R. Grinter, T. Rodden, P. Aoki, E. Cutrell, R. Jeffries, and G. Olson, Eds. CHI '06. ACM, New York, NY, 1009-1018
Consolvo, S., Smith, I. E., Matthews, T., LaMarca, A., Tabert, J., and Powledge, P. 2005. Location disclosure to social relations: why, when, & what people want to share. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Portland, Oregon, USA, April 02 - 07, 2005). CHI '05. ACM, New York, NY, 81-90.
Khalil, A. and Connelly, K. 2006. Context-aware telephony: privacy preferences and sharing patterns. In Proceedings of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Banff, Alberta, Canada, November 04 - 08, 2006). CSCW '06. ACM, New York, NY, 469-478.
Week 7 (February 25, 27): Privacy
February 25: Privacy policies - Guest speakers, Janice Tsai and Aleecia McDonald [McDonald slides]
February 27: Privacy software [student: Mallios (first half of class)] [slides]
Reading assignment:
Chapter 22 Privacy Policies and Privacy Preferences
Chapter 23 Privacy Analysis for the Casual User Through
Bugnosis
Chapter 26 Anonymity Loves Company: Usability and the Network
Effect
J. Gideon, S. Egelman, L. Cranor, and A. Acquisti. Power Strips, Prophylactics,
and Privacy, Oh My!. In Proceedings of the Symposium On Usable Privacy and
Security 2006, Pittsburgh, PA, July 12-14, 2006.
Sheng, S., Magnien, B., Kumaraguru, P., Acquisti, A., Cranor, L. F., Hong, J., and Nunge, E. 2007. Anti-Phishing Phil: the design and evaluation of a game that teaches people not to fall for phish. In Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 18 - 20, 2007). SOUPS '07, vol. 229. ACM, New York, NY, 88-99. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1280680.1280692
Jagatic, T., Johnson, N., Jakobsson, M., Menczer,
F. Social Phishing. Commun. ACM. To appear.
M. Wu. 2006. Fighting Phishing at the User Interface. Thesis submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kumar, M., Garfinkel, T., Boneh, D., and Winograd, T. 2007. Reducing shoulder-surfing by using gaze-based password entry. In Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 18 - 20, 2007). SOUPS '07, vol. 229. ACM, New York, NY, 13-19. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1280680.1280683
Niklas Frykholm and Ari Juels, Error-Tolerant
Password Recovery. In P. Samarati, ed., Eighth ACM Conference
on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 1-8. ACM
Press. 2001.
April 14: Biometrics [student: O'Meara (first half of class)] [slides]
Reading assignment:
Chapter 9 Graphical Password Schemes
Chapter 10 Biometric Authentication
Chapter 11 Identifying Users from Their Typing Patterns
Optional readings:
Chiasson, S., Biddle, R., and van Oorschot, P. C. 2007. A second look at the usability of click-based graphical passwords. In Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 18 - 20, 2007). SOUPS '07, vol. 229. ACM, New York, NY, 1-12. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1280680.1280682
Dirik, A. E., Memon, N., and Birget, J. 2007. Modeling user choice in the PassPoints graphical password scheme. In Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 18 - 20, 2007). SOUPS '07, vol. 229. ACM, New York, NY, 20-28. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1280680.1280684
Moncur, W. and Leplatre, G. 2007. Pictures at the ATM: exploring the usability of multiple graphical passwords. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA, April 28 - May 03, 2007). CHI '07. ACM, New York, NY, 887-894. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240758.
X. Suo and Y. Zhu. Graphical
Passwords: A Survey. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
December 5-9, 2005,
Tucson, Arizona.
Dunphy, P. and Yan, J. 2007. Do background images improve "draw a secret" graphical passwords?. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (Alexandria, Virginia, USA, October 28 - 31, 2007). CCS '07. ACM, New York, NY, 36-47. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1315245.1315252
Almut Herzog, and Nahid Shahmehri. Security and Usability of Personal Firewalls. Proceedings of the IFIP TC-11 22nd International Information Security Conference (SEC 2007), 14-16 May 2007, Sandton, South Africa.
Botta, D., Werlinger, R., Gagne, A., Beznosov, K., Iverson, L., Fels, S., and Fisher, B. 2007. Towards understanding IT security professionals and their tools. In Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 18 - 20, 2007). SOUPS '07, vol. 229. ACM, New York, NY, 100-111. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1280680.1280693
Week 15 (April 28, 30): PKIs and secure communications
April 28: PKIs and secure communications
[student: Studer] [slides]
April 30: Guest speaker - Patrick McGregor - "Realities and Challenges of Enterprise Data Control"
Reading assignment:
Chapter 16 Making the Impossible Easy: Usable PKI
Chapter 30 Embedding Security in Collaborative Applications: A
Lotus/Domino Perspective
Optional readings:
Chapter 31 Achieving Usable Security in Groove Virtual Office
This class will have no final exam, however, the final exam period
May 6, 8:30-11:30 am will be used for final project presentations. Final project papers
will be due May 9 at 4pm.
You are responsible for being familiar with the university
standard for academic honesty and plagiarism. Please see the CMU
Student Handbook for information. In order to deter and detect
plagiarism, online tools and other resources are used in this
class. Students caught
cheating or plagiarizing will receive no credit for the assignment
on which the cheating occurred. Additional actions -- including
assigning the student a failing grade in the class or referring the
case for disciplinary action -- may be taken at the discretion of
the instructors.
Your final grade in this course will be based on:
25% Homework
25% Lecture
50% Project
Homework
Homework assignments for this class will include reading summaries
as well as written assignments. All homework is due in printed form in class at 1:30
pm each Monday (unless otherwise specified). Homework submitted after 1:45 pm will be considered late. Homework will be graded as check-plus (100%), check (80%),
check-minus (60%) or 0. Late homework will receive one grade lower than it would have otherwise received if it is submitted no later than at the beginning of the next class meeting (after that it will not be accepted). Your two lowest homework grades will be
dropped from your homework average.
Students are expected to do reading assignments prior to class so
that they can participate fully in class discussions. Students must
submit a short summary (3-8 sentences) and a "highlight" for each
chapter or article in the reading assignment. The highlight may be
something you found particularly interesting or noteworthy, a
question you would like to discuss in class, a point you disagree
with, etc.
Students in 08-734 and 05-899 are expected to include a summary and highlight
for one optional reading of their choice each week. All other students are encouraged to
review some of the optional readings that they find interesting, but
they need not submit summaries or highlights of the optional
readings.
Lecture
Each student will be assigned a class lecture to
prepare and present. The lecture should be based on the topics
covered in that week's reading assignment, but it should go beyond
the materials in the required reading. Do not present a lecture that simply summarizes the assigned reading. For example, you might read and
present some of the related work mentioned in the reading or that
you find on your own (the HCISec Bibliography is a
good starting point for finding papers), you might
present some of the relevant optional reading materials (feel free to use relevant materials from other weeks), you might
demonstrate software mentioned in the reading, you might critique
a design discussed in the reading, or you might design a class
exercise for your classmates. If the material you present describes a user study, include a detailed description and critique of the study design. As part of your lecture you
should prepare several discussion questions and lead a class
discussion. You should also introduce your fellow students to
terminology and concepts they might not be familiar with that are
necessary to understand the material you are presenting. You should
email to the instructor a set of PowerPoint slides including
lecture notes and discussion questions. These slides will be posted
on the class web site. In addition, the instructor may include all
or part of your presentation slides and notes in an instructor's
guide for future usable privacy and security
courses.
Students in 08-734 and 05-899 will be assigned all or most of a class period for their
lecture. Students in 08-534 will be assigned a time slot of no more than
30 minutes.
Project
Students will work on semester projects in small
groups that include students with a variety of areas of
expertise. Each project group will propose a project. It is expected
that most projects will involve the design of a user study to
evaluate the design of an existing or proposed privacy- or
security-related system or gain insight into users' attitudes or
mental models related to some aspect of security or privacy. Groups
with ideas for other types of projects should discuss them with the
instructor before submitting their project proposals. As part of the
project students will:
Submit a one-page project proposal by March 5. The proposal should describe the system you propose to design or evaluate, discuss what you hope to learn from your user study and/or the hypotheses you plan to test, and provide and overview of your preliminary user study plan (what types of tasks will you have participants do? what types of people will you recruit? will you use a finished software product, prototype, paper prototype, etc. in your user study? will this be a between-subjects or within-subjects study?)
Complete an IRB application with all necessary attachments and submit it to IRB as early in the semester as possible.
Design all questionnaires, scripts, scenarios, interview
protocols, etc. necessary to carry out the user study.
Develop any prototypes necessary to carry out the user study.
Test the user study protocol on at least two people (can be members of the
class from other project groups) and refine it based on these tests.
Give a 10-15 minute progress report presentation on March 31 or April 2.
Submit a written progress report by March 31. Your written progress report and presentation should describe your progress to date and any problems you have run into that you would like some advice on. In addition, the written report should include a revised user study plan and the details of your initial pilot user study, including the study design and scripts (and results if you have already completed the initial study)
Conduct a study using the revised protocol with at least
6 subjects. (Optionally, you can conduct a larger study that would be likely to lead to publishable results. If your study has only 6 subjects, most likely this will be useful mostly as a pilot study, and should be positioned as such in your paper.)
Give a 15-minute final project presentation during the final exam period.
Write a paper giving an overview of the proposed study, what
you hope to learn from it, what you learned from the pilot study,
etc. and submit it by May 9 at 4 pm in both electronic and printed form. Your IRB forms, survey forms,
etc. should be included as appendices.
Students signed up for 5-899 and 08-734 are expected to play a leadership
role in a project group and write a project paper suitable for
publication. Unless your group has only 08-534 students in it, that
means your final paper should be written in a style suitable for
publication at a conference or workshop. The conference papers in
the optional readings provide some good examples of what a
conference paper looks like and the style in which they are
written. In addition to describing what you did in your study, your
paper should include a related work section and properly-formatted
references. Papers should follow the SOUPS 2008
technical papers formatting instructions, but you may include
appendixes that exceed the 12 page limit and do not follow the SOUPS formatting guidelines (indeed, your required
appendixes should exceed this limit). If you have identified an
alternative relevant conference and would prefer to use that
conference's submission format for your paper, please discuss it
with the instructor.
