Abstract

Billions of web-based email and chat messages are sent over the Internet every day. However, very few service providers support end-to-end privacy protection. While providing security for these messages is technically feasible, usability remains a challenge in this field. Recent research attempts to hide security details like key management and encryption in order to make the system more usable. However usability studies demonstrated that hiding these details may confuse the user and contribute to mistakes (e.g., sending out an email in plaintext when the user thought it would be encrypted). In an effort to increase trust and eliminate mistakes, this thesis presents the design of a browser-based manual encryption mechanism that supports automatic key-management and manual encryption. It also describes the Message Protector (MP) prototype. An evaluations of MP is presented based on a user study conducted on the campus of BYU.

Degree

College and Department

Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Computer Science

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/