Abstract
Despite substantial improvements made by the usable security community at raising lay people's awareness of, motivation to use, and knowledge of how to use security and privacy tools (i.e., their security sensitivity), much security advice remains ignored and many security tools remain underutilized. I argue that this low security sensitivity can be at least partially explained by the fact that security and privacy behaviors can have myriad social consequences. For example, by using two-factor authentication, one might also be perceived as paranoid or as someone with something to hide. To that end, in this article, I will describe some recent work that introduces and establishes a theoretical foundation for a new genre of usable security research: social cybersecurity.
About the author
Sauvik Das is a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, where he is advised by Dr. Jason Hong and Dr. Laura Dabbish. In his research, he draws on social science theory to invent novel, more socially compatible security tools that makes end-user security less isolating and more likely to spread through social channels. He also works on other topics broadly within HCI, including: game personalization, mobile authentication, friendsourcing, and ubiquitous computing. He is a NDSEG fellow, a Qualcomm Innovation Fellow, a NSF EAPSI fellow, and a Facebook Fellowship finalist. His work has won numerous awards, including a best paper award at UbiComp, a best paper honorable mention at CHI, and an honorable mention for the NSAś Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper in 2015. His work has also been covered by the popular press, including features on The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, The Financial Times, Slate and other media outlets.
Carnegie Mellon University, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, 15213, PA, USA
Acknowledgement
This work would not have been possible without the collaboration of my advisers and colleagues: Jason I. Hong, Laura A. Dabbish, Tiffany Hyun-Jin Kim, Adam D. I. Kramer and Melissa Luu-Van.
©2016 Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
