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Record W4205632572 · doi:10.22215/etd/2021-14764

End User Mental Models of Social Engineering Attacks

2021· dissertation· en· W4205632572 on OpenAlexaff
Lin Kyi

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typedissertation
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSpam and Phishing Detection
Canadian institutionsCarleton University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSocial engineering (security)Affect (linguistics)Computer scienceEngineeringData sciencePsychologyComputer security

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

How do end users understand social engineering attacks, and how do their mental models differ from reality? To investigate, we have proposed a new social engineering attack framework, and ran two studies using the framework as the foundation. In the first study, we conducted 30 interviews to investigate social engineering mental models, and found that confidence and accuracy are underlying themes that affect users' mental models. In the second survey, we quantified how confidence and accuracy impact mental models at different stages of an attack. We found that users tend to be overconfident in their ability to understand social engineering attacks, but hold inaccurate beliefs. They hold major misconceptions of what constitutes as social engineering, and the threat levels of these attacks. Based on our results, we have proposed various educational and design opportunities to match social engineering mitigation strategies to end user mental models of social engineering. supported me at every step of my thesis, and for teaching me very valuable research skills. I really appreciate all of the support and attention you give all of your students, and am always amazed at how you balance everything so well!

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.642
Threshold uncertainty score0.505

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.013
GPT teacher head0.242
Teacher spread0.229 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2021
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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