Usable Security

Developing usable secure systems in the context of a developing nation like India is a big challenge. Our goal is to understand the way users use secure systems and use this understanding to develop technologies which will get adopted in real-world.

Current Projects:

Past Projects:

 
SMSAssassin: Detecting SMS Spams using Crowd Sourcing Approach

Due to exponential increase in use of Short Message Service (SMS) over mobile phones in developing countries, there has been a burst of spam SMSes. The main goal for this research is to build algorithms and solutions to reduce the SMS spams in developing nations like India. We use crowd-sourcing approach, apply machine learning techniques and keep the user preferences in our solutions. We are currently evaluating the effectiveness of the system in real-world among some volunteers (thanks for their time and efforts!).

Dataset
If you are interested in sharing your SMS spams with us, please send them to +91 8826068429. Visit our Facebook page for more on our Dataset.

Relevant publications
Yadav, K., Kumaraguru, P., Goyal, A., Gupta, A., and Naik, V. Smsassassin : Crowdsourcing driven mobile-based system for sms spam filtering. Accepted at HotMobile (2011). Author’s version

Core members
Kuldeep Yadav, Ph.D. Student (Lead student) 
Rushil Khurana, UG, IIIT-Delhi 
Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru 
Prof. Vinayak Naik 

Visiting students
Dipesh Kumar Singh, UG student, Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology

Past members
Atul Goyal, UG student, IIIT-D 
Ashish Gupta, UG student, IIIT-D 

In News (selected ones)
Crowdsourced software could stop SMS spam (New Scientist)
We were on Google’s Sci/Tech. homepage for a few hours on March 7, 2011
Now ‘Kill’ that unwanted SMS (Mid-day) 

If you are interested in knowing more or helping us with the research please write to pk [dot] guru [at] iiit [dot] ac [dot] in

Sponsors

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ChaMAILeon: Simplified email sharing like never before!

While passwords, by definition, are meant to be secret, recent trends in the Internet usage have witnessed an increasing number of people sharing their email passwords for both personal and professional purposes. As sharing passwords increases the chances of your passwords being compromised, leading websites like Google strongly advise their users not to share their passwords with anyone. To cater to this conflict of usability versus security and privacy, we introduce ChaMAILeon, an experimental service, which allows users to share their email passwords while maintaining their privacy and not compromising their security. ChaMAILeon provides users with a unique capability to define access control on their emails. Now you can control who can see which emails and who can send emails to whom from your account, by having multiple passwords for your email. The service is already up and running! You can access it at the URL mentioned below.

URL
http://precog.iiitd.edu.in/chaMAILeon

Technical Report
Dewan P., Gupta M., Kumaraguru P., ChaMAILeon: Simplified email sharing like never before, IIITD-TR-2012-003

Core Team
Prateek Dewan, Ph.D. Scholar (Lead student)
Mayank Gupta, UG, Delhi College of Engineering
Prof. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru

Past Members
Sheethal Shreedhar, UG, NIT-Surathkal

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PhishGuru

Online security attacks are a growing concern among Internet users. Currently, the Internet community is facing three types of security attacks: physical, syntactic, and semantic. Semantic attacks take advantage of the way humans interact with computers or interpret messages. There are three major approaches to countering semantic attacks: silently eliminating the attacks, warning users about the attacks, and training users not to fall for the attacks. The existing methods for silently eliminating the attack and warning users about the attack are unlikely to perform flawlessly; furthermore, users are the weakest link in these attacks, it is essential that user training complement other methods. Most existing online training methodologies are less successful because: (1) organizations that create and host training materials expect users to proactively seek out such material themselves; (2) these organizations expect users to have some knowledge about semantic attacks; and (3) the training materials have not been designed with learning science principles in mind.

The goal of this work was to show that computer users trained with an embedded training system – one grounded in the principles of learning science – are able to make more accurate online trust decisions than users who read traditional security training materials, which are distributed via email or posted online. To achieve this goal, we focus on "phishing," a type of semantic attack. We have developed a system called "PhishGuru" based on embedded training methodology and learning science principles. Embedded training is a methodology in which training materials are integrated into the primary tasks users perform in their day-to-day lives. In contrast to existing training methodologies, the PhishGuru shows training materials to users through emails at the moment ("teachable moment") users actually fall for phishing attacks.

URL
http://www.wombatsecurity.com/phishguru

PhishGuru is currently being commercialized by Wombat Security Technologies.

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Anti-Phishing Phil

As another implementation of phishing training, we used learning science principles to develop Anti-Phishing Phil, an educational game. Phil was designed to train users about phishing attacks, motivating them to learn by embedding training into a fun activity. The highly interactive nature of the game allows it to teach users to distinguish legitimate links from fraudulent ones; it also provides users with immediate opportunities to practice this procedure multiple times. Anti-Phishing Phil complements PhishGuru by providing an entertaining platform for the rapid repetition and feedback needed to teach more difficult anti-phishing procedures.

URL
http://www.wombatsecurity.com/antiphishingphil

Anti-Phishing Phil is currently being commercialized by Wombat Security Technologies.

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