Study Finds Bank of America SiteKey is Flawed

An anonymous reader writes "The NYT reports on a Harvard and MIT study, which finds that the SiteKey authentication system employed by Bank of America is ineffective at prevent phishing attacks. SiteKey requires users to preselect an image and to recognize this image before they login, but users don't comply. 'The idea is that if customers do not see their image, they could be at a fraudulent Web site, dummied up to look like their bank's, and should not enter their passwords. The Harvard and M.I.T. researchers tested that hypothesis. In October, they brought 67 Bank of America customers in the Boston area into a controlled environment and asked them to conduct routine online banking activities, like looking up account balances. But the researchers had secretly withdrawn the images. Of 60 participants who got that far into the study and whose results could be verified, 58 entered passwords anyway. Only two chose not to log on, citing security concerns.' The study, aptly entitled "The Emperor's New Security Indicators", is available online."

Comments

Flawed system or flawed usage?

[stillachild]

Seems to me like the system itself is not flawed, but the way the users choose to operate on it. This could be due to a lack of clear explanation by the BOA website.

Re:Flawed system or flawed usage?

[russ1337]

>>>"In my experience with the technology, websites do not adequately explain what it is you're doing and why"

I'm a B of A customer, and I thought it was made pretty clear about how the sitekey worked - so did my wife (as non-technical as she is). If people are not seeing their site-key and continuing with the 'experiment', perhaps the experiment was flawed. (The people may have felt they should continue even though the sitekey was not present, as they wanted the experiment to succeed.)

Also, I don't think I'd be logging into my BofA account on someones strange computer that was 'set-up' for me... fear of keyloggers and all that.