arXiv subjects

Serge Egelman

Publications and source records attributed to Serge Egelman.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Report on the Designing Accountable Software Systems Workshop

The Workshop on Designing Accountable Software Systems (DASS) was convened in November 2024 with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation to engage a wide range of current and future stakeholders from government, academia, and industry on the cross-disciplinary topic of accountability in software systems. Over two days, attendees engaged in a series of panels, invited talks, and breakout sessions covering: (1) the dimensions of accountability, including legal compliance as well as business and societal aspects and drivers; (2) a conceptual model of the various structures needed to realize accountability; (3) the sources of legal requirements that affect software; (4) the operationalization of legal requirements in software; (5) the requirements to preserve evidence needed to conduct investigations; and (6) a range of challenges and contextual factors beyond software that affect why some accountability structures succeed, while others fail. The workshop was conducted as a collaborative systematization of knowledge that culminated in several research directions. The findings include the importance of clarifying definitions and responsibilities within accountable organizations, which can affect whether those researching accountability are making assumptions that limit the generalizability of findings. Further research was also identified as needed to study the ways to improve the translation of accountability structures into the software design process while improving engagement with stakeholders, such as legislators, regulators, business executives and system developers. Finally, a key finding was the high demands that DASS-like research projects place on interdisciplinary teams: both in terms of team formation and sustainment, as well as, the specific demands of cross-disciplinary learning that covers both research methods, research dissemination, and career development.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

The Medium is the Message: How Secure Messaging Apps Leak Sensitive Data to Push Notification Services

Like most modern software, secure messaging apps rely on third-party components to implement important app functionality. Although this practice reduces engineering costs, it also introduces the risk of inadvertent privacy breaches due to misconfiguration errors or incomplete documentation. Our research investigated secure messaging apps' usage of Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) service to send push notifications to Android devices. We analyzed 21 popular secure messaging apps from the Google Play Store to determine what personal information these apps leak in the payload of push notifications sent via FCM. Of these apps, 11 leaked metadata, including user identifiers (10 apps), sender or recipient names (7 apps), and phone numbers (2 apps), while 4 apps leaked the actual message content. Furthermore, none of the data we observed being leaked to FCM was specifically disclosed in those apps' privacy disclosures. We also found several apps employing strategies to mitigate this privacy leakage to FCM, with varying levels of success. Of the strategies we identified, none appeared to be common, shared, or well-supported. We argue that this is fundamentally an economics problem: incentives need to be correctly aligned to motivate platforms and SDK providers to make their systems secure and private by default.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Lessons in VCR Repair: Compliance of Android App Developers with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) provides California residents with a range of enhanced privacy protections and rights. Our research investigated the extent to which Android app developers comply with the provisions of the CCPA that require them to provide consumers with accurate privacy notices and respond to "verifiable consumer requests" (VCRs) by disclosing personal information that they have collected, used, or shared about consumers for a business or commercial purpose. We compared the actual network traffic of 109 apps that we believe must comply with the CCPA to the data that apps state they collect in their privacy policies and the data contained in responses to "right to know" requests that we submitted to the app's developers. Of the 69 app developers who substantively replied to our requests, all but one provided specific pieces of personal data (as opposed to only categorical information). However, a significant percentage of apps collected information that was not disclosed, including identifiers (55 apps, 80%), geolocation data (21 apps, 30%), and sensory data (18 apps, 26%) among other categories. We discuss improvements to the CCPA that could help app developers comply with "right to know" requests and other related regulations.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Surveying Vulnerable Populations: A Case Study of Civil Society Organizations

Compared to organizations in other sectors, civil society organizations (CSOs) are particularly vulnerable to security and privacy threats, as they lack adequate resources and expertise to defend themselves. At the same time, their security needs and practices have not gained much attention among researchers, and existing solutions designed for the average users do not consider the contexts in which CSO employees operate. As part of our preliminary work, we conducted an anonymous online survey with 102 CSO employees to collect information about their perceived risks of different security and privacy threats, and their self-reported mitigation strategies. The design of our preliminary survey accounted for the unique requirements of our target population by establishing trust with respondents, using anonymity-preserving incentive strategies, and distributing the survey with the help of a trusted intermediary. However, by carefully examining our methods and the feedback received from respondents, we uncovered several issues with our methodology, including the length of the survey, the framing of the questions, and the design of the recruitment email. We hope that the discussion presented in this paper will inform and assist researchers and practitioners working on understanding and improving the security and privacy of CSOs.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2018

Cybercasing 2.0: You Get What You Pay For

Under U.S. law, marketing databases exist under almost no legal restrictions concerning accuracy, access, or confidentiality. We explore the possible (mis)use of these databases in a criminal context by conducting two experiments. First, we show how this data can be used for "cybercasing" by using this data to resolve the physical addresses of individuals who are likely to be on vacation. Second, we evaluate the utility of a "bride to be" mailing list augmented with data obtained by searching both Facebook and a bridal registry aggregator. We conclude that marketing data is not necessarily harmless and can represent a fruitful target for criminal misuse.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2018

The Accuracy of the Demographic Inferences Shown on Google's Ad Settings

Google's Ad Settings shows the gender and age that Google has inferred about a web user. We compare the inferred values to the self-reported values of 501 survey participants. We find that Google often does not show an inference, but when it does, it is typically correct. We explore which usage characteristics, such as using privacy enhancing technologies, are associated with Google's accuracy, but found no significant results.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2018

Quantifying Users' Beliefs about Software Updates

Software updates are critical to the performance, compatibility, and security of software systems. However, users do not always install updates, leaving their machines vulnerable to attackers' exploits. While recent studies have highlighted numerous reasons why users ignore updates, little is known about how prevalent each of these beliefs is. Gaining a better understanding of the prevalence of each belief may help software designers better target their efforts in understanding what specific user concerns to address when developing and deploying software updates. In our study, we performed a survey to quantify the prevalence of users' reasons for not updating uncovered by previous studies. We used this data to derive three factors underlying these beliefs: update costs, update necessity, and update risks. Based on our results, we provide recommendations for how software developers can better improve users' software updating experiences, thereby increasing compliance and, with it, security.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2017

The Feasibility of Dynamically Granted Permissions: Aligning Mobile Privacy with User Preferences

Current smartphone operating systems regulate application permissions by prompting users on an ask-on-first-use basis. Prior research has shown that this method is ineffective because it fails to account for context: the circumstances under which an application first requests access to data may be vastly different than the circumstances under which it subsequently requests access. We performed a longitudinal 131-person field study to analyze the contextuality behind user privacy decisions to regulate access to sensitive resources. We built a classifier to make privacy decisions on the user's behalf by detecting when context has changed and, when necessary, inferring privacy preferences based on the user's past decisions and behavior. Our goal is to automatically grant appropriate resource requests without further user intervention, deny inappropriate requests, and only prompt the user when the system is uncertain of the user's preferences. We show that our approach can accurately predict users' privacy decisions 96.8% of the time, which is a four-fold reduction in error rate compared to current systems.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2015

Risk Perceptions for Wearable Devices

Wearable devices, or "wearables," bring great benefits but also potential risks that could expose users' activities with- out their awareness or consent. In this paper, we report findings from the first large-scale survey conducted to investigate user security and privacy concerns regarding wearables. We surveyed 1,782 Internet users in order to identify risks that are particularly concerning to them; these risks are inspired by the sensor inputs and applications of popular wearable technologies. During this experiment, our questions controlled for the effects of what data was being accessed and with whom it was being shared. We also investigated how these emergent threats compared to existent mobile threats, how upcoming capabilities and artifacts compared to existing technologies, and how users ranked technical and nontechnical concerns to sketch a concrete and broad view of the wearable device landscape. We hope that this work will inform the design of future user notification, permission management, and access control schemes for wearables.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2015

Android Permissions Remystified: A Field Study on Contextual Integrity

Due to the amount of data that smartphone applications can potentially access, platforms enforce permission systems that allow users to regulate how applications access protected resources. If users are asked to make security decisions too frequently and in benign situations, they may become habituated and approve all future requests without regard for the consequences. If they are asked to make too few security decisions, they may become concerned that the platform is revealing too much sensitive information. To explore this tradeoff, we instrumented the Android platform to collect data regarding how often and under what circumstances smartphone applications are accessing protected resources regulated by permissions. We performed a 36-person field study to explore the notion of "contextual integrity," that is, how often are applications accessing protected resources when users are not expecting it? Based on our collection of 27 million data points and exit interviews with participants, we examine the situations in which users would like the ability to deny applications access to protected resources. We found out that at least 80% of our participants would have preferred to prevent at least one permission request, and overall, they thought that over a third of requests were invasive and desired a mechanism to block them.

cs.CR↗