A Distinguish Paper Award for CUPS, and Other News from Ninth Annual SOUPS 2013

CyLab graduate student Cristian Bravo Lillo presents at SOUPS 2013

The ninth annual Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2013) was held July 9th through July 11th at Northumbria University (Newcastle, U.K.).

Lorrie Cranor, Director of CyLab Usable Privacy and Security (CUPS), chaired the conference, and CyLab Associate Research Professior Lujo Bauer served as technical papers co-chair.

CUPS researchers Cristian Bravo-Lillo, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Julie Downs, Saranga Komanduri, and Robert W. Reeder (Carnegie Mellon University), Stuart Schechter (Microsoft Research), and Manya Sleeper (Carnegie Mellon University) won one of two Distinguished Paper Awards, for Your Attention Please: Designing Security-Decision UIs to Make Genuine Risks Harder to Ignore.

Here is a brief excerpt with a link to the full text:

We designed and tested attractors for computer security dialogs: user-interface modi cations used to draw users' attention to the most important information for making decisions. Some of these modi cations were purely visual, while others temporarily inhibited potentially-dangerous behaviors to redirect users' attention to salient information. We conducted three between-subjects experiments to test the effectiveness of the attractors. In the fi rst two experiments, we sent participants to perform a task on what appeared to be a third-party site that required installation of a browser plugin. We presented them with what appeared to be an installation dialog from their operating system. Participants who saw dialogs that employed inhibitive attractors were signifi cantly less likely than those in the control group to ignore clues that installing this software might be harmful. In the third experiment, we attempted to habituate participants to dialogs that they knew were part of the experiment. We used attractors to highlight a eld that was of no value during habituation trials and contained critical information after the habituation period. Participants exposed to inhibitive attractors were two to three times more likely to make an informed decision than those in the control condition. Your Attention Please: Designing Security-Decision UIs to Make Genuine Risks Harder to Ignore, Cristian Bravo-Lillo, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Julie Downs, Saranga Komanduri, and Robert W. Reeder (Carnegie Mellon University), Stuart Schechter (Microsoft Research), and Manya Sleeper (Carnegie Mellon University)


The SOUPS proceedings will be archived in the ACM Digital Library in a few weeks. All papers are also available linked from the SOUPS 2013 program page on the SOUPS site.

CyLab graduate student Pedro Leon presents At SOUPS 2013