arXiv subjects

Srivathsan G. Morkonda

Publications and source records attributed to Srivathsan G. Morkonda.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

"Sign in with ... Privacy'': Timely Disclosure of Privacy Differences among Web SSO Login Options

The number of login options on web sites has increased since the introduction of web single sign-on (SSO) protocols. Web SSO services allow users to grant web sites or relying parties (RPs) access to their personal profile information from identity provider (IdP) accounts. Many RP sites fail to provide sufficient privacy-related information to allow users to make informed login decisions. Moreover, privacy differences in permission requests across login options are largely hidden from users and are time-consuming to manually extract and compare. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of popular RP implementations supporting three major IdP login options (Facebook, Google, and Apple) and categorize RPs in the top 500 sites into four client-side code patterns. Informed by these RP patterns, we design and implement SSOPrivateEye (SPEye), a browser extension prototype that extracts and displays to users permission request information from SSO login options in RPs covering the three IdPs.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Influences of Displaying Permission-related Information on Web Single Sign-On Login Decisions

Web users are increasingly presented with multiple login options, including password-based login and common web single sign-on (SSO) login options such as "Login with Google" and "Login with Facebook". There has been little focus in previous studies on how users choose from a list of login options and how to better inform users about privacy issues in web SSO systems. In this paper, we conducted a 200-participant study to understand factors that influence participants' login decisions, and how they are affected by displaying permission differences across login options; permissions in SSO result in release of user personal information to third-party web sites through SSO identity providers. We compare and report on login decisions made by participants before and after viewing permission-related information, examine self-reported responses for reasons related to their login decisions, and report on the factors that motivated their choices. We find that usability preferences and inertia (habituation) were among the dominant factors influencing login decisions. After participants viewed permission-related information, many prioritised privacy over other factors, changing their login decisions to more privacy-friendly alternatives. Displaying permission-related information also influenced some participants to make tradeoffs between privacy and usability preferences.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Work in progress: Identifying Two-Factor Authentication Support in Banking Sites

Two-factor authentication (2FA) offers several security benefits that security-conscious users might expect from high-value services such as online banks. In this work, we present our preliminary study to develop a scoring scheme to automatically recognize when bank sites mention support for two-factor authentication. We extract information related to security features (primarily 2FA) offered by 379 bank domains from 93 countries. We use a subset of these sites to refine our scoring scheme to include several heuristics for identifying whether sites offer 2FA. For each bank domain in our dataset, we use our algorithm based on text-analysis to calculate whether the domain offers 2FA to the users of the domain's online banking platform. Our preliminary findings suggest that 2FA is yet to be widely adopted by banking domains.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Exploring Privacy Implications in OAuth Deployments

Single sign-on authentication systems such as OAuth 2.0 are widely used in web services. They allow users to use accounts registered with major identity providers such as Google and Facebook to login on multiple services (relying parties). These services can both identify users and access a subset of the user's data stored with the provider. We empirically investigate the end-user privacy implications of OAuth 2.0 implementations in relying parties most visited around the world. We collect data on the use of OAuth-based logins in the Alexa Top 500 sites per country for five countries. We categorize user data made available by four identity providers (Google, Facebook, Apple and LinkedIn) and evaluate popular services accessing user data from the SSO platforms of these providers. Many services allow users to choose from multiple login options (with different identity providers). Our results reveal that services request different categories and amounts of personal data from different providers, with at least one choice undeniably more privacy-intrusive. These privacy choices (and their privacy implications) are highly invisible to users. Based on our analysis, we also identify areas which could improve user privacy and help users make informed decisions.

cs.CR↗