Experimenting At Scale With Google Chrome's SSL Warning
Venue
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2014)
Publication Year
2014
Authors
Adrienne Porter Felt, Robert W. Reeder, Hazim Almuhimedi, Sunny Consolvo
BibTeX
Abstract
Web browsers shown HTTPS authentication warnings (i.e., SSL warnings) when the
integrity and confidentiality of users' interactions with websites are at risk. Our
goal in this work is to decrease the number of users who click through the Google
Chrome SSL warning. Prior research showed that the Mozilla Firefox SSL warning has
a much lower click-through rate (CTR) than Chrome. We investigate several factors
that could be responsible: the use of imagery, extra steps before the user can
proceed, and style choices. To test these factors, we ran six experimental SSL
warnings in Google Chrome 29 and measured 130,754 impressions.
