University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“I Can’t Believe It’s Not Custodial!” Usable Trustless Decentralized Key Management

Sharma, Tanusree; Nair, Vivek C.; Wang, Henry; Wang, Yang; Song, Dawn

Content Files
Final_MFKDF_Camera_Ready.pdf

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/122291

Description

Title
“I Can’t Believe It’s Not Custodial!” Usable Trustless Decentralized Key Management
Author(s)
  • Sharma, Tanusree
  • Nair, Vivek C.
  • Wang, Henry
  • Wang, Yang
  • Song, Dawn
Issue Date
2024-03-22
Keyword(s)
  • Usability in security and privacy
  • Security and privacy
  • Multi-factor
  • Crypto
Date of Ingest
2024-03-22T23:23:38-05:00
Abstract
Key management has long remained a difficult unsolved problem in the field of usable security. While password-based key derivation functions (PBKDFs) are widely used to solve this problem in centralized applications, their low entropy and lack of a recovery mechanism make them unsuitable for use in decentralized contexts. The multi-factor key derivation function (MFKDF) is a recently proposed cryptographic primitive that aims to address these deficiencies by incorporating commonly used authentication factors into the key derivation process. In this paper, we implement an MFKDF-based Ethereum wallet and perform a user study with 27 participants to directly compare its usability against traditional cryptocurrency wallet architectures. Our results show that MFKDF-based applications outperform conventional key management approaches on both subjective and objective metrics, with a 37% higher average SUS score (p < 0.0001) and 71% faster task completion times (p < 0.0001) for the MFKDF-based wallet.
Publisher
ACM
Has Part
10.1145/3613904.3642464
Series/Report Name or Number
ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-0330-0/24/05
Type of Resource
text
Genre of Resource
conference paper
Language
eng
Sponsor(s)/Grant Number(s)
  • National Science Foundation
  • National Physical Science Consortium
  • Fannie and John Hertz Foun- datio
  • Berkeley Center for Responsibl
Copyright and License Information
2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-0330-0/24/05

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Student Publications and Research - Information Sciences PRIMARY
Publications, conference papers, and other research and scholarship of iSchool students.