Anonymity Loves Company: Usability and the Network Effect. Dingledine, R. & Mathewson, N. June 2006.
Anonymity Loves Company: Usability and the Network Effect [link]Paper  abstract   bibtex   
A growing field of literature is studying how usability impacts security [4]. One class of security software is anonymizing networks–- overlay networks on the Internet that provide privacy by letting users transact (for example, fetch a web page or send an email) without revealing their communication partners. In this position paper we focus on the network effects of usability on privacy and security: usability is a factor as before, but the size of the user base also becomes a factor. We show that in anonymizing networks, even if you were smart enough and had enough time to use every system perfectly, you would nevertheless be right to choose your system based in part on its usability for other users.
@conference {usability:weis2006,
	title = {Anonymity Loves Company: Usability and the Network Effect},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2006)},
	year = {2006},
	month = {June},
	address = {Cambridge, UK},
	abstract = {A growing field of literature is studying how usability impacts security [4]. One class of security software is anonymizing networks--- overlay networks on the Internet that provide privacy by letting users transact (for example, fetch a web page or send an email) without revealing their communication partners.
In this position paper we focus on the network effects of usability on privacy and security: usability is a factor as before, but the size of the user base also becomes a factor. We show that in anonymizing networks, even if you were smart enough and had enough time to use every system perfectly, you would nevertheless be right to choose your system based in part on its usability for other users.},
	keywords = {anonymity, privacy},
	url = {http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.61.510},
	author = {Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson},
	editor = {Ross Anderson}
}

Downloads: 0