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

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

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

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

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

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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