Security Mental Model: Cognitive map approach

TL;DR

This paper explores how users' mental models influence security decision-making, using cognitive maps and crowdsourcing to better understand human factors in security systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining cognitive maps and crowdsourcing to elicit and analyze users' security mental models.

Findings

Users' mental models significantly impact security behavior

Crowdsourcing effectively captures diverse security perceptions

The approach aids in designing more user-centric security models

Abstract

Security models have been designed to ensure data is accessed and used in proper manner according to the security policies. Unfortunately, human role in designing security models has been ignored. Human behavior relates to many security breaches and plays a significant part in many security situations.In this paper, we study users' security decision making toward security and usability through the mental model approach. To elicit and depict users' security and usability mental models, crowd sourcing techniques and cognitive map method are applied and we have performed an experiment to evaluate our findings using Amazon MTurk.