Brand Validation: Security Indicator to Better Indicate Website Identity

Extended validation (EV) certificates provide web users with information about the identity of the visited websites, and the security indicators of EV certificates provide information on how to distinguish whether a visited website is legitimate. Although EV certificates have been used for over ten years, general web users still do not sufficiently understand the mechanism of EV certification or what the indicators mean. Through preliminary interviews, we extracted the relationship between three key factors in security conception on the basis of users’ cognitive processes: attention, comprehension, and trust. Specifically, indicators should draw users’ attention and have clear meanings for increasing their comprehension; thus, indicators can assure users of the trustworthiness of websites on the basis of users’ correct attention and comprehension. We designed brand validation (BV) indicators, which are new website identity indicators that display brand or service names on the URL bar and certification processes in the detailed dialogue. According to results of an online survey to evaluate identity indicators, our BV indicators were more trusted by participants than the ordinary EV ones. Besides, because most opinions on domain validation (DV) indicators being trustworthy were based on misunderstandings or habituation, by excluding these incorrect opinions, our BV indicators were far more trusted by participants than the DV ones. Our BV indicators could better educate participants to comprehend the meaning of website identity more correctly than the ordinary EV and DV ones.