Interventions over smart card swiping behaviour

Abstract

Background. A social influence of a messenger or the broken-window effect may impact the compliance level for security policies [11, 19, 26]. Aim. We investigate the effect of socio-environmental interventions on smart card swiping behaviour. Method. We conducted a study with three conditions in a between-subjects design on a sample of N = 54 university students owning a university-issued access-control smart card. In all three groups, participants were asked to complete a set of Capture the Flag challenges in our Cyber Security Room where they had no Internet access. Outside of the room, the participants could access the Internet. Thereby, participants were compelled to leave and enter the room, without disclosing the experiment purpose. We asked participants to swipe their smart card on entering and exiting the Cyber Security Room. The Control group had no intervention. The Discrete+ experiment group was exposed to a Messenger influence [11]. The Continuous-experiment group was exposed to an untidy Cyber Security Room, which was inspired by the broken-window Theory [26]. We measured swiping behavior on entry and exit, computing total swipes and swipe rate ratio as key metrics subjected to an Analysis of Variance. Results. We found a statistically significant large effect of the Continuous-intervention, that is, the broken-window effect impacting the total swipe rate negatively, Hedges' g =-1.04, 95% CI [-1.78,-0.28]. Conclusion. While having observed a negligible effect size between the Control and Discrete+ groups, we acknowledge that the swipe rate was high for both of these groups. From the effect size of the Control group and Continuous-group, we offer evidence towards an untidy area and lack of compliance for security policies.