Will You Trust This TLS Certificate? Perceptions of People Working in IT (Extended Version)

Result code in IS VaVaI
<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216224%3A14330%2F20%3A00116278" target="_blank" >RIV/00216224:14330/20:00116278 - isvavai.cz</a>
Result on the web
<a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3419472" target="_blank" >https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3419472</a>
DOI - Digital Object Identifier
<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3419472" target="_blank" >10.1145/3419472</a>

Result language
angličtina
Original language name
Will You Trust This TLS Certificate? Perceptions of People Working in IT (Extended Version)
Original language description
Flawed TLS certificates are not uncommon on the Internet. While they signal a potential issue, in most cases they have benign causes (e.g., misconfiguration or even deliberate deployment). This adds fuzziness to the decision on whether to trust a connection or not. Little is known about perceptions of flawed certificates by IT professionals, even though their decisions impact high numbers of end users. Moreover, it is unclear how much the content of error messages and documentation influences these perceptions. To shed light on these issues, we observed 75 attendees of an industrial IT conference investigating different certificate validation errors. We also analyzed the influence of reworded error messages and redesigned documentation. We find that people working in IT have very nuanced opinions, with trust decisions being far from binary. The self-signed and the name-constrained certificates seem to be over-trusted (the latter also being poorly understood). We show that even small changes in existing error messages can positively influence resource use, comprehension, and trust assessment. At the end of the article, we summarize lessons learned from conducting usable security studies with IT professionals.
Czech name
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Czech description
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Type
J<sub>SC</sub> - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the SCOPUS database
CEP classification
—
OECD FORD branch
10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Publication year
2020
Confidentiality
S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

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