Paper 2022/075
Uncovering Impact of Mental Models towards Adoption of Multi-device Crypto-Wallets
Abstract
Cryptocurrency users saw a sharp increase in different types of crypto wallets in the past decade. However, the emerging multi-device (threshold) wallets, even with improved security guarantees over their single-device counterparts, are yet to receive proportionate adoption. This work presents a data-driven investigation into the perceptions of users towards multi-device/threshold wallets, using a survey of 357 crypto-wallet users. Our results revealed two significant groups among our participants—Newbies and Non-newbies. Our follow-up qualitative analysis, after educating revealed a gap between the mental model for these participants and actual security guarantees. Furthermore, we investigated preferred default settings for crypto-wallets across our participants over different key-share distribution settings of multi-device wallets—the threat model considerations affected user preferences, signifying a need for contextualizing default settings. We identify concrete, actionable design avenues for future multi-device wallet designs and present novel cryptographic problems to realize those.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. Minor revision. ACM CCS 2023
- Keywords
- UsabilityCrypto-walletsMulti-device wallets
- Contact author(s)
- e mangipudi @ supraoracles com
- History
- 2024-08-06: last of 3 revisions
- 2022-01-20: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2022/075
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/075,
author = {Easwar Vivek Mangipudi and Udit Desai and Mohsen Minaei and Mainack Mondal and Aniket Kate},
title = {Uncovering Impact of Mental Models towards Adoption of Multi-device Crypto-Wallets},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2022/075},
year = {2022},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/075}
}