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by | February 24, 2020 · 2:42 AM

How People Survive the Cryptojungle

Cryptocurrency markets have grown substantially in recent years, and have attracted new users and investors, pushing the overall number of owners into the millions. At the same time, the number of distinct cryptocurrencies has exploded to over 5,000. In this burgeoning and chaotic “cryptojungle,” new and unexplored incentives and risks drive the behavior of users and non-users of cryptocurrencies. While previous research has focused almost exclusively on Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies and utility tokens have been ignored.  Led by my PhD student Artemij Voskobojnikov, an interview study of cryptocurrency users and non-users focused on their perceptions and management of cryptocurrency risks as well as their reasons for or against involvement with cryptocurrencies. 

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by | September 25, 2017 · 6:25 PM

Understanding the Risks and Prevention

I will be on a panel on “Understanding the Risks and Prevention” at Cyber Security Forum, organized by the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade on October 20.

by | June 24, 2016 · 7:46 AM

Collaborative Study of Snooping on Mobile Phones Gets SOUPS Award

13483102_1026748250714486_8884387583233611527_oSOUPS ’16 paper on the prevalence of snooping on mobile phones has received Distinguished Paper award. The paper reports a series of quantitative studies that allowed a more accurate measurement of this phenomena. The study was led by our collaborators at the University of Lisbon. It was inspired by our previous study presented at Mobile CHI ’13. Continue reading →

by | June 6, 2016 · 8:31 AM

Sharing Health Information on Facebook Among Americans

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Motivated by the benefits, people have used a variety of web-based services to share health information (HI) online. Among these services, Facebook, which enjoys the largest population of active subscribers, has become a common place for sharing various types of HI. At the same time, Facebook was shown to be vulnerable to various attacks, resulting in unintended information disclosure, privacy invasion, and information misuse. As such, Facebook users face the dilemma of benefiting from HI sharing and risking their privacy. In this SOUPS ’16 paper, we report our investigation of HI sharing practices, preferences, and risk perceptions among US Facebook users. Continue reading →

by | June 15, 2015 · 8:46 AM

How Much Can Chunking Help to Remember Banking PINs?

chunkingTo ensure that users do not choose weak personal identification numbers (PINs), many banks give out system-generated random PINs. 4-digit is the most commonly used PIN length, but 6-digit system-generated PINs are also becoming popular. The increased security we get from using system-generated PINs, however, comes at the cost of memorability. And while banks are increasingly adopting system-generated PINs, the impact on memorability of such PINs has not been studied.

In a collaboration among Honeywell ACS Labs, Sungkyunkwan University, Oregon State University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UBC, we conducted a large-scale online user study with 9,114 participants to investigate the impact of increased PIN length on the memorability of PINs, and whether number chunking techniques (breaking a single number into multiple smaller numbers) can be applied to improve memorability for larger PIN lengths. Our findings have been reported at SOUPS ’15. Continue reading →