Understanding End-User Security, Privacy and Trust in Sociotechnical Systems through a Human-Centered Approach

February 21, 2025
Categories: Events, Seminar Series

Feb 24, 2025 11-12, WWH 335

Arjun Arunasalam
Department of Computer Science
Purdue University

Sociotechnical systems are broadly defined as systems that blend technological aspects with human elements including human behaviors and mental models. These structures are increasingly integrating complex components such as extended reality and generative AI, to enable applications across interfaces such as the web, mobile phones, and VR devices. Thus, they have earned widespread adoption among end users. However, threat actors also operate within sociotechnical systems, introducing harm to stakeholders on these platforms, affecting their security and privacy.

In this talk, I will discuss how I leverage human-centered mixed methods, ranging from quantitative to qualitative methods to expose emerging abuse from threat actors and understand how such abuse can impact the security and privacy of end users. In particular, I will first detail how I use digital ethnographic approaches to characterize abusive dropshipping – an emerging business model perpetrated by threat actors on e-commerce platforms. Second, I will dive into my mixed-method investigation of another form of sociotechnical abuse: online toxic content, and how it impacts the security and privacy of a specific population: refugees. Through these efforts, I synthesize important findings for both general and at-risk end users to build safer and more secure sociotechnical environments.

Arjun Arunasalam is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. Prior to joining Purdue, Arjun earned his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Arjun has conducted research on a variety of topics, including sociotechnical security and privacy as well as human-centered computing. His dissertation focuses on leveraging mixed methods to understand end-users’ security, privacy, and trust in diverse sociotechnical systems, ranging from social media and e-commerce platforms to extended reality and human-AI interfaces. His research has appeared in top security and HCI venues such as USENIX Security, NDSS, ICWSM, and CSCW.