July 2013
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110 Reads
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1 Citation
Secure GUIs have been proposed in the literature and few commercial products implement their concepts. One of these concepts is to provide a reserved area on screen where the name and trustworthiness (or security-level) of the application is shown that has currently the input/output focus of the user. While usability studies in the context of web browsers and phishing have shown that passive security indicators do not effectively protect users, usability studies on the operating system level for secure GUIs have not been conducted to the best of our knowledge. With our research we try to shed light in this situation. We study two different approaches to display the reserved area as trusted statusbar. The approaches we evaluated support to execute different virtual machines (compartments) with varying security sensitivity. Our results show that the statusbar—independent from being displayed on the top or the bottom of the screen— enables participants to select the proper compartment in two of three cases.