Reevaluating the effectiveness of visual cues for website security

Abstract

Certificate authorities (CAs) are responsible for providing security for the online world. Anytime an individual enters personal information on a website, there are possibilities of interception by a hacker to reveal this data. For this purpose, security has been implemented on websites to protect data from being stolen. Not all websites are secured, but those that do, display some sort of notification indicating that a trusted CA has confirmed its legitimacy through digital signatures and validation. These visual indicators are meant to raise awareness, and in turn, allow the user to make an educated decision to proceed or seize in their next move. This paper investigates the studies conducted on visual cues. The goal is to find out how often Internet users actually look at these security indicators and how useful they actually consider them to be. This paper also attempts to explore if notifications are being ignored and if so, is it intentional and why, or do they go unnoticed due to the lack of knowledge. While researching this topic, it was found that there are other tools such as add-ons available to enhance security notifications but the valued impact was not significant. The focus of this paper is to determine if people find these visual cues to be ambiguous or a nuisance and over time discontinue using them, or do they go unnoticed all together? The conclusions made from researching this area of security is to resolve user behavior speculations and standardize visual cues with a teachable component.