Evaluating Effectiveness of Mobile Browser Security Warnings

This work precisely evaluates whether browser security warnings are as ineffective as proposed by popular sentiments and past writings. This research used different kinds of Android mobile browsers as well as desktop browsers to evaluate security warnings. Security experts and developers should give emphasis on making a user aware of security warnings and should not neglect aim of communicating this to users. Security experts and system architects should emphasis the goal of communicating security information to end users. In most of the browsers, security warnings are not emphasized, and browsers simply do not show warnings, or there are a number of ways to hide those warnings of malicious sites. This work precisely finds that how inconsistent browsers really are in prompting security warnings. In particular, majority of the modern mobile web browsers are vulnerable to these security threats. We find inconsistency in SSL warnings among web browsers. Based on this work, we make recommendations for warning designers and researchers.