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A usability test of whitelist and blacklist-based anti-phishing application

Published: 03 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Anti-phishing tools on a web browser warn about spoofing pages or/and prompt to essential and necessary information that assists users to identify spoofing and potentially harmful pages. In order to discover how well users can identify phishing pages with these tools after they understand how the tools work, we designed and conducted usability tests for two detection mechanisms of anti-phishing tools: the blacklist-based and whitelist-based anti-phishing toolbars. As a result, we report that no significant performance differences between the blacklist-based and whitelist-based applications were found; but some other interesting findings and observations were collected. The most valuable observation is that due to the deficiency of existing web identities on the web pages and web browsers, e.g. abstract and professional web page security certificate information, anti-phishing toolbars need to be more illustrative and instructional in order to assist users to find reliable information for identifying the authenticity of the content on the web pages.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
MindTrek '12: Proceeding of the 16th International Academic MindTrek Conference
October 2012
278 pages
ISBN:9781450316378
DOI:10.1145/2393132
  • Conference Chair:
  • Artur Lugmayr
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 03 October 2012

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  1. phishing
  2. phishing prevention
  3. usability

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MindTrek '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 19 of 43 submissions, 44%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 110 of 207 submissions, 53%

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