Bringing Effective Security Warnings to Mobile Browsing

With the newest generation of smartphones, internet usage on mobile devices nally hits the masses. Till now, security and privacy awareness of mobile internet usage has drawn few attention in research and industry. However, with its raise the number of users that employ those devices for security sensitive tasks like internet banking raises as well. Therefore, security and privacy mechanisms for mobile devices should be considered in future work. Most of the systems that have already been invented are optimized for desktop computers and cannot (or only hardly) be adopted to mobile devices. Another problem is limited screen space. In this work, a symbiotic approach to security and privacy awareness on mobile devices is motivated and discussed. Mobile devices have several output channels. Those can be used and combined to deliver security relevant messages to users. Colors, vibration, sound and combinations of them might help to raise awareness. Metaphors based on hardware output might even enable to overcome weaknesses of current software based mechanisms like habituation problems.