Between Effort and Security: User Assessment of the Adequacy of Security Mechanisms for App Categories

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of the smartphone, the number of people using it for financial transactions such as online shopping, online banking or mobile payment is also growing. Apps used in these contexts store sensitive and valuable data, creating a need for security measures. It has not yet been researched to what extent certain authentication mechanisms, which can be information-, biometric- as well as token-based, are suitable for individual apps and the respective data. The goal of this work is to assess how perceived security and estimated effort of using such mechanisms, as well as the degree to which app data is considered worth protecting, influence users’ choices of appropriate measures to protect app categories. Therefore, we conducted a representative study (n=1024). On the one hand, our results show that a positive correlation between perceived security and effort exists for all investigated non-biometric authentication methods. On the other hand, the study sheds light on the differences between the investigated app categories and the users’ choice of the appropriate security mechanisms for the particular category. In contrast to perceived security having a positive influence on a user’s preference of mechanism, a relation can hardly be identified for effort. Moreover, app data sensitivity does not seem relevant for the users’ choice of security mechanism.