Managing our online account security

The number of online services, accounts, apps, and devices that we use is constantly increasing and so is the complexity of the interconnections between them. These interconnections have been exploited in targeted attacks that range from account takeovers to cryptocurrency theft. Protecting users from such attacks is difficult because each user’s account ecosystem is individual.

In this talk I will introduce account access graphs which are a formal model to represent a user’s account ecosystem, i.e., the collection of accounts, apps, and devices, as well as their interconnections. I will show examples of account access graphs from our user studies and present some of the insights we have gained from them. I will then discuss some of the challenges we must overcome in order to build an account management tool aimed at empowering users to better protect their individual account ecosystem.

This talk is based on joint work published at CCS 2019, CHI 2022 and carried out at ETH Zurich, the University of Dundee and Heriot-Watt University.