Students are required to write an essay on a selected topic in the course's area. The essay will be graded from 1-5.

Below is a list of possible essay topics. The students can select a topic from the list or suggest their own topics by March 2, 2012 via email to the lecturer. 

Length of the essay should be about 8 pages with given template. We will use the ACM CHI 2012 template for Work-in-progress papers. Follow the link below to download the template:

• template for Word
• template for LaTex

There are two deadlines for returning the essay:

1. first draft DL April 20, 2012  - a scheme of intended essay contents + some references
2. final version DL May 31, 2012.

Return your essay as a pdf.file to kristiina.karvonen@hiit.fi by each deadline.

Essay topics

1. ”Definition for Usable security”. Whitten and Tygar aimed at a definition for usable security in their paper Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt. Make a literature survey on more recent related work to compare, abandon or extend their original definition.
2. ”Why is privacy management so hard?” With so many new social media tools, such as Facebook and Google Buzz, just to name two examples, we have seen that maintaining one’s privacy online can indeed be tricky. On basis of recent work in this area, discuss these challenges and the current aims to tackle them.
3. ”Better privacy management” – on basis of related work and your own analysis, redesign the privacy management for an online service you know well. First present the service and issues related to its current privacy management, then proceed with the redesign.
4. ”Trust online”. Learning who to trust online and who not to trust can be tricky business, as the usual cues for trustworthiness tend to be missing in the online world. On basis of previous work in the area of trust formation in the online environment, discuss issues related to users and online trust from a selected viewpoint (e.g. how to design for trustworthiness; how online trust is formed; how usability and trust formation are related; or similar) .
5. ”Usable security and social networking”. Users are involved more and more intensely in interactions online through social networking tools. Discuss the challenges and novel demands to creating usable security due to the emergence of social networking tools.
6. ”Usable security – a case study”. Select a service or product that somehow involves security and analyse its usability against course material and other related work as you see fit. You can also make a case study or run a small user study on a security product/service.
7. ”Identity online”. Identity theft has become a major problem in the Intenet. Discuss the different issues related and present an overview of interesting work in this area.
8. ”Why we fall for Phishing”. Users are susceptible to online scams where they end up losing private information and/or money. Why do users fall for these scams? Discuss the issue on basis of relevant work in the area.
9. ”New ways to authenticate”. Users tend to do badly when it comes to remembering good passwords. Why? Here you can either 1) discuss the human side, why users are bad at passwords and cite relevant work in the area or b) present work that aims at developing new ways to authenticate users that go beyond traditional passwords (e.g. graphical passmeans).
10. ”How to study usable security?”. Present how usable security has been studied since the classics through a selection of papers that you consider good (or bad). What is missing? What could be improved?
11. = your own topic. You can suggest something completely different or for example combine two topics from above.