Gorazd Kandus

A Survey on Saving Personal Data in the Mobile Phone

Modern smart phones have provided users countless opportunities to access, process and store data in various ways and formats. Inevitably, the user himself has started storing personal data too in the mobile phone. Drawing results from a study we realized, in a sample of 7172 students in 17 Universities of 10 Eastern and Southern Europe countries, we are initially providing useful insight into the practice of saving personal data in mobile phones. Furthermore, we are examining the effect it has to security awareness, feeling and practices of students discovering that there is indeed a statistically significant connection. These results can help both academia and industry focus their security awareness campaigns and efforts to specific subsets of users that mostly need them. Finally, as there are not available any already validated questionnaires in regards to this specific research topic, our research, apart from revealing the situation, aims at providing a basis for the formulation of similar questionnaires for future use.

Feeling Secure vs. Being Secure the Mobile Phone User Case

In this work, we are comparing the subjective security feeling of mobile phone users to the (objectively agreed) best security practices. This was possible by statistically processing a large pool of 7172 students in 17 Universities of 10 European countries. We introduced a “mean actual security value”, comparing their security practices to best practices. There was a clear negative connection between feeling secure and actually being secure. Users that feel that mobile phone communication is secure, tend to be less cautious in their security practices. Moreover, we extracted profiles of students according to their mobile phone communication security feeling. These profiles belong to well defined categories. Users, exhibit different values of a metric that we named “mean security feeling value” according to their age, field of study, brand and operating system of phone, connection type, monthly bill and backup frequency. These results can help both academia and industry focus their security awareness campaigns and efforts to specific subsets of users that mostly need them. Finally, as there are not available any already validated questionnaires in regards to this specific research topic, our research, apart from revealing the situation, aims at providing a basis for the formulation of similar questionnaires for future use.

Ramifications of mobile phone advanced O/S on security perceptions and practices

The present paper correlates advanced operating systems (O/S) in mobile phones to the security perceptions and practices of users. It is based upon the results of a survey that took place in 17 Universities of 10 Eastern and Southern Europe countries. 7172 questionnaires were gathered and processed with the results showing that there is a statistically significant connection between the type of the phones O/S (advanced or not) and the security feeling, awareness and practices of users. Users of advanced O/S believe they are more informed and feel more secure (both statistically proved). Unfortunately, even though they subjectively feel informed, their actual objective score in regards to awareness questions is lower than that of non advanced O/S users, while their actual security behavior, is just slightly better than that of other users. This false sense of security and awareness renders them more vulnerable than others. In any case, the overall percentages reveal general lack of awareness and moderate attention to security issues, with some even alarming findings. As such, the need for security education, combined with transparent security features in the phones is apparent. Furthermore, in regards to this specific research topic, there are not available any already validated questionnaires. Our research, apart from revealing the situation, aims at providing a basis for the formulation of similar questionnaires for future use.

Mobile Phone Downloading among Students: The Status and Its Effect on Security

Mobile Internet is steadily gaining momentum allowing users to browse the World Wide Web from their mobile phones, downloading at the same time applications and games. Drawing results from a study we realized, in a sample of 7172 students in 17 Universities of 10 Eastern and Southern Europe countries, we are initially providing useful insight into the state of mobile downloading penetration in the student population. Furthermore, we are examining the effect it has to security awareness, feeling and practices of students discovering that there is indeed a statistically significant connection. Namely, users actively downloading are only 37% of the student population and are mostly concentrated in older student ages. In addition, their actual behavior in regards to security practices is generally better than that of other users, especially for those that mainly download applications. As it was found, students with lower monthly bills do not know if their mobile phone has the ability to download software. Thus, by enhancing their knowledge, operators will profit by increased mobile downloading while users will enjoy better services.

PINEPULSE: A System to PINpoint and Educate Mobile Phone Users with Low Security

The threats mobile phone users face, are about to increase due to the rapid penetration of advanced smartphone devices and the growing Internet access using them. As such, reinforcing users’ security has become a critical imperative. This paper refers to a system that pinpoints and informs mobile phone users that have a low security level, thus helping them protect themselves. The system consists of software-application, installed in mobile phones as well as of software and data bases, installed in the mobile telephony operators’ servers. Mobile telephony providers (by adopting this application), as well as manufacturers (by pre-installing it in their phones), could help mitigate the increased security threats effectively protecting the end users.