Community-based web security: complementary roles of the serious and casual contributors

  • Authors:

  • Pern Hui Chia;John Chuang

  • Affiliations:

  • Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Does crowdsourcing work for web security? While the herculean task of evaluating hundreds of millions of websites can certainly benefit from the wisdom of crowds, skeptics question the coverage and reliability of inputs from ordinary users for assessing web security. We analyze the contribution patterns of serious and casual users in Web of Trust (WOT), a community-based system for website reputation and security. We find that the serious contributors are responsible for reporting and attending to a large percentage of bad sites, while a large fraction of attention on the goodness of sites come from the casual contributors. This complementarity enables WOT to provide warnings about malicious sites while differentiating the good sites from the unknowns. This in turn helps steer users away from the numerous bad sites created daily. We also find that serious contributors are more reliable in evaluating bad sites, but no better than casual contributors in evaluating good sites. We discuss design implications for WOT and for community-based systems more generally.