Multitasking Increases Stress and Insecure Behavior on Mobile Devices

One of the biggest challenges in security is human behavior, which with one poor decision can easily bypass even the most secure encryption. This is particularly true for mobile devices, which are now part of the full range of human activity. Our project seeks to discover the conditions under which mobile users are most likely to make security errors, so that we may offer timely encouragement toward safe mobile behavior. Our earlier work indicated that any condition causing stress may increase insecure behavior, with the cause of that stress being relatively unimportant. We therefore focused on multitasking, and asked participants to choose applications to install on the phone, a particularly important security decision. Participants experienced more stress and made more security errors when multi-tasking. This suggests that when mobile users are multi-tasking, designers might create especially effective warnings and guards against error.