SPICE: A Software Tool for Bridging the Gap Between End-user's Insecure Cyber Behavior and Personality Traits

Abstract

End users are prone to insecure cyber behavior that may lead them to compromise the integrity, availability or confidentiality of their computer systems. For instance, replying to a phishing email may compromise an end user's login credentials. Identifying tendency toward insecure cyber behavior is critically important to improve cyber security posture and thesis of this paper is that the susceptibility of end-users to be a victim of a cyber-attack may be predicted using personality traits such as trait anxiety and callousness. This paper presents an easily configurable, script-based software tool to explore the relationships between the personality traits and insecure cyber behaviors of end users. The software utilizes well-established cognitive methods (such as dot probe) to identify a number of personality traits for a user and further allows researchers to design and conduct experiments through customizable scripting to study the endusers' insecure cyber behaviors. The software also collects fine-grained data on users for analysis.