PERMARUN- A Persuasive Game to Improve User Awareness and Self-Efficacy Towards Secure Smartphone Behaviour

Android smartphones have undergone various changes and, uniformity in design (both hardware and software) has become common in most phones. Yet, security and privacy issues persist and grow along with the evolution of smartphones. Recent research shows that user awareness is still low, and they do not follow secure behaviour while using smartphones. Although a handful of works exist for improving user awareness and self-efficacy, none of them educate the users about Android Permissions in a contextual manner. In this paper, we discuss our persuasive game - "PermaRun", which teaches and motivates users to follow secure smartphone behaviour, increases user awareness and self-efficacy about android permissions. We conducted a Heuristic Evaluation for Playability (HEP) and Persuasiveness Evaluation (PE). The result shows that players had a positive experience playing the game, and they found the game playable and persuasive.