Authors:
Ana Ferreira*+, Jean-Louis Huynen*+, Vincent Koenig*+, Gabriele
Lenzini+ and, Salvador Rivas* 
  
* Educational Measurement and Applied Cognitive Science, Univ. of
Luxembourg 
+ Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust,
Univ. of Luxembourg 


Title: 
What is in a WiFi Access Point Name? (Socio-Technical Threats in
Context and Trust) 
 
Abstract:
We study context and trust as elements influencing how people chose
names when this choice has consequences for security. Our mindset is
that of an attacker that sets up unauthorized WiFi access points,
wondering what WiFi names he should use to hook more users seeking for
Internet connectivity. For this purpose, we surveyed two groups of
people. We asked them to rate a list of WiFi access point names. Not
all names are of existing WiFi networks: some are strategically
made-up. The groups rank the WiFi they would use, first in general and
then either in four distinctive contexts or in the awareness of the
perception of trust those names transmit. The results suggest how
attackers can tune their attack to have higher successful attack
rate. In general our results prove that the attackers, by interfering
with the context and with the perception of user trust, can affect
people's choice in a way they can predict and control. They also
indicate strategies --again socio-technical as they consist of acting
on the two presented elements-- to help people resisting those
attacks.