Exploring Website Location as a Security Indicator

TL;DR

This paper investigates how website location information influences user security decisions, proposing a location-based security indicator and evaluating its impact on user behavior through qualitative and user study methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel security indicator based on website location and assesses its effectiveness in influencing user decision-making.

Findings

Users are less likely to perform security-sensitive tasks when alerted to location changes.

Website location can serve as an effective security indicator.

Users accept location information as part of security decision-making.

Abstract

Authenticating websites is an ongoing problem for users. Recent proposals have suggested strengthening current server authentication methods by incorporating website location as a comprehensible additional trust factor. In this work, we explore users' acceptance of location information and how it affects decision-making for security and privacy. We conducted a series of qualitative interviews to learn how location can be integrated into users' decision-making for security, and we designed a security indicator to alert the user to changes in website locations. We evaluated our tool in a 44-participant user study and found that users were less likely to perform security-sensitive tasks when alerted to location changes. Our results suggest that website location can be used as an effective indicator for users' security assessments.