Towards Usable Blockchain Interfaces - Interaction Concepts for Key Management

Problem Statement

Public key cryptography is a concept frequently used in computer science - however recent increase in popularity of blockchain systems (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum) now requires users outside of this domain to deal with private/ public key cryptography.

The goal of this thesis is to look at public key cryptography from an HCI perspective and analyze interaction concepts for key management. How do (end-) users interact with blockchain systems? How do they deal with the challenges of public key cryptography? And which novel interaction concepts – building on existing work – can be developed to reduce complexity of key management?

Tasks

• Review of related literature
• Analyze existing strategies for key management
• Design and conduct user study
• Develop and evaluate an (improved) concept for key management

Preferred qualification

• Knowledge in the area of human computer interaction
• Independent thinking and creative problem solving
• Interest in designing and conducting user studies
• Web Development Experience (optional)
• Interest in crypto currencies (optional)

Links

• https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1251435
• https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7031848
• https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/soups2018/soups2018-ruoti.pdf
• https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04351
• https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2017/62700/62700.pdf

If you are interested in they topic, please send an email to michael.froehlich ät unibw.de.