Security Assessment of E-Tax Filing Websites

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the technical security and user perception of E-Tax Filing websites across multiple levels of government, identifying best practices and proposing enhancements to improve overall security and trust.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive security assessment of E-Tax Filing websites, highlighting gaps between technical security and user perception, and offers new security recommendations.

Findings

Many websites lack robust technical security measures.

User perception often overestimates website security.

The study proposes additional security techniques for improvement.

Abstract

Technical security is only part of E-Commerce security operations; human usability and security perception play major and sometimes dominating factors. For instance, slick websites with impressive security icons but no real technical security are often perceived by users to be trustworthy (and thus more profitable) than plain vanilla websites that use powerful encryption for transmission and server protection. We study one important type of E-Commerce transaction website, E-Tax Filing, that is exposed to large populations. We assess a large number of international (5), Federal (USA), and state E-Tax filing websites (38) for both technical security protection and human perception of security. As a result of this assessment, we identify security best practices across these E-Tax Filing websites and recommend additional security techniques that have not been found in current use by E-Tax Filing websites.