Abstract
Secure messaging tools are an integral part of modern society. To understand users' security and privacy perceptions and requirements for secure group chat, we surveyed 996 respondents in the US and UK. Our results show that group chat presents important security and privacy challenges, some of which are not present in one-to-one chat. For example, users need to be able to manage and monitor group membership, establish trust for new group members, and filter content that they share in different chat contexts. We also find that respondents lack mechanisms for determining which tools are secure and instead rely on non-technical strategies for protecting their privacy-for example, self-filtering and carefully tracking group membership.To better understand how these results relate to existing tools, we conduct cognitive walkthroughs (a form of expert usability review) for five popular group chat tools. Our results demonstrate that while existing tools address some items identified in our surveys, this support is partial and is insufficient in many cases. As such, there is a need for improved group chat tools that better align with user perceptions and requirements. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations on improving the security and usability of secure group chat.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 15 |
| Journal | Digital Threats: Research and Practice |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 2022 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
This work was in part funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—SFB 1119—236615297. Authors’ addresses: S. Oesch, O. Diallo, J. Simmons, and S. Ruoti, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee TN 37996; emails: {toesch1, osouleym, jsimmo58}@vols.utk.edu, [email protected]; R. Abu-Salma, King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, UK; email: [email protected]; J. Krämer, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt 64289, Germany; email: [email protected]; J. Wu, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah UT 84602; email: [email protected]. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. 2576-5337/2022/02-ART15 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3491265
Keywords
- Group chat
- privacy
- security
- user perceptions