Neither Access nor Control: A Longitudinal Investigation of the Efficacy of User Access-Control Solutions on Smartphones

Authors: 

Masoud Mehrabi Koushki, Yue Huang, Julia Rubin, and Konstantin Beznosov, University of British Columbia

Abstract: 

The incumbent all-or-nothing model of access control on smartphones has been known to dissatisfy users, due to high overhead (both cognitive and physical) and lack of device-sharing support. Several alternative models have been proposed. However, their efficacy has not been evaluated and compared empirically, due to a lack of detailed quantitative data on users' authorization needs. This paper bridges this gap with a 30-day diary study. We probed a near-representative sample (N = 55) of US smartphone users to gather a comprehensive list of tasks they perform on their phones and their authorization needs for each task. Using this data, we quantify, for the first time, the efficacy of the all-or-nothing model, demonstrating frequent unnecessary or missed interventions (false positive rate (FPR) = 90%, false negative rate (FNR) = 21%). In comparison, we show that app- or task-level models can improve the FPR up to 88% and the FNR up to 20%, albeit with a modest (up to 15%) increase in required upfront configuration. We also demonstrate that the context in which phone sharing happens is consistent up to 75% of the time, showing promise for context-based solutions.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {279896,
author = {Masoud Mehrabi Koushki and Yue Huang and Julia Rubin and Konstantin Beznosov},
title = {Neither Access nor Control: A Longitudinal Investigation of the Efficacy of User {Access-Control} Solutions on Smartphones},
booktitle = {31st USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 22)},
year = {2022},
isbn = {978-1-939133-31-1},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {917--935},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/koushki},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}

Presentation Video