2019/10/30 by D. J. Major, Danny Yuxing Huang, Major, David J. +5
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Advanced Malware Detection Techniques #Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1910.14112
openalex publication_date 2019/10/30 · openalex created_date 2022/07/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Many Internet of Things (IoT) devices have voice user interfaces (VUIs). One\nof the most popular VUIs is Amazon's Alexa, which supports more than 47,000\nthird-party applications ("skills"). We study how Alexa's integration of these\nskills may confuse users. Our survey of 237 participants found that users do\nnot understand that skills are often operated by third parties, that they often\nconfuse third-party skills with native Alexa functions, and that they are\nunaware of the functions that the native Alexa system supports. Surprisingly,\nusers who interact with Alexa more frequently are more likely to conclude that\na third-party skill is native Alexa functionality. The potential for\nmisunderstanding creates new security and privacy risks: attackers can develop\nthird-party skills that operate without users' knowledge or masquerade as\nnative Alexa functions. To mitigate this threat, we make design recommendations\nto help users distinguish native and third-party skills.\n