publications

2022

1. Scientific Poster

   Presentation of the poster in IST PhD Open Days

   Carreira, Carolina

   IST PhD Open Days 2022

   PDF
2. Scientific Poster

   Presentation of the poster in CMU Portugal 2021 Summit - New frontiers in Tech

   Carreira, Carolina

   CMU Portugal 2021 Summit - New frontiers in Tech 2022

   PDF
3. PhD-iFM’22

   Studying Users’ Willingness to Use a Formally Verified Password Manager

   Carreira, Carolina

   PhD Symposium at the 17th International Conference on integrated Formal Methods (iFM) 2022

2021

1. Masters Thesis

   On Usable Security and Verified Password Managers

   Carreira, Carolina

   Instituto Superior Tecnico - Universidade de Lisboa 2021

   Abs

   Password Managers (PMs) are useful tools to manage passwords but they are not widely used. Studies indicate usability problems and distrust from users as the reasons for the low adoption of PMs. As such, we propose extending an existing PM by implementing relevant usability best practices and increasing transparency by educating users about how PMs work. This project is part of the PassCert research project, which aims to build a formally verified PM. Therefore, another goal is to explore ways that effectively convey to users the formally verified properties. We performed user studies that suggest that our solution improves the usability of the PM and that we were able to convey relevant information about its formally verified features. We contribute with the first study on users’ perceptions of formal verification on PMs and hope that our findings can help the formal verification security community better communicate with end-users.

2. appFM’21

   Exploring Usable Security to Improve the Impact of Formal Verification: A Research Agenda

   Carreira, Carolina, Ferreira, João F, Mendes, Alexandra, and Christin, Nicolas

   First Workshop on Applicable Formal Methods (co-located with Formal Methods 2021). 2021

   Abs

   As software becomes more complex and assumes an even greater role in our lives, formal verification is set to become the gold standard in securing software systems into the future, since it can guarantee the absence of errors and entire classes of attack. Recent advances in formal verification are being used to secure everything from unmanned drones to the internet. At the same time, the usable security research community has made huge progress in improving the usability of security products and end-users comprehension of security issues. However, there have been no human-centered studies focused on the impact of formal verification on the use and adoption of formally verified software products. We propose a research agenda to fill this gap and to contribute with the first collection of studies on people’s mental models on formal verification and associated security and privacy guarantees and threats. The proposed research has the potential to increase the adoption of more secure products and it can be directly used by the security and formal methods communities to create more effective and secure software tools.

3. INFORUM’21

   Towards Improving the Usability of Password Managers

   Carreira, Carolina, Ferreira, João F, and Mendes, Alexandra

   INFORUM 2021

   Abs

   Security experts strongly recommend the use of Password Managers (PMs). However, PMs are not widely used and studies indi- cate usability problems and distrust from users as the reasons for their low adoption. In this paper, we review usability challenges of PMs and we propose the use of known usability best practices and techniques to extend and improve Bitwarden, a widely-popular open-source PM. Since this work is done in the context of the PassCert project, which aims to build a formally verified PM, we also investigate ways to effectively convey to users the formally verified properties. We report on prelim- inary results and we propose a methodology to evaluate our extension of Bitwarden and to determine the impact of formal verification on the adoption of PMs.

4. Scientific Poster

   Presentation of the Poster for the paper "Towards Improving the Usability of Password Managers"

   Carreira, Carolina

   INForum 2021

   PDF

1905