Who Stores the Private Key? An Exploratory Study about User Preferences of Key Management for Blockchain-based Applications

Clemens Brunner, Günther Eibl, Peter Fröhlich, Andreas Sackl, Dominik Engel

2021

Abstract

Applications based on blockchain technology have become popular. While these applications have clear benefits, users are not yet familiar with their usage, which could hinder further applications of this technology. In this paper, an online survey with 110 potential users, as a representative of an average citizen, was conducted. The focus of this survey is to explore their preferences concerning the interaction with blockchain-based applications by mainly focusing on how to handle private keys. To best of our knowledge this is the first study where average citizens are asked about the preferred management of a private key, which is necessary when interacting with blockchain-based applications. One of the main results was that about 80% of the participants would like to have the benefit of data sovereignty despite the cost of being fully responsible to backup their credentials.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Brunner C., Eibl G., Fröhlich P., Sackl A. and Engel D. (2021). Who Stores the Private Key? An Exploratory Study about User Preferences of Key Management for Blockchain-based Applications.In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP, ISBN 978-989-758-491-6, pages 23-32. DOI: 10.5220/0010173200230032

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icissp21,
author={Clemens Brunner and Günther Eibl and Peter Fröhlich and Andreas Sackl and Dominik Engel},
title={Who Stores the Private Key? An Exploratory Study about User Preferences of Key Management for Blockchain-based Applications},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,},
year={2021},
pages={23-32},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010173200230032},
isbn={978-989-758-491-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,
TI - Who Stores the Private Key? An Exploratory Study about User Preferences of Key Management for Blockchain-based Applications
SN - 978-989-758-491-6
AU - Brunner C.
AU - Eibl G.
AU - Fröhlich P.
AU - Sackl A.
AU - Engel D.
PY - 2021
SP - 23
EP - 32
DO - 10.5220/0010173200230032