SpearSim: Design and Evaluation of Synthetic Task Environment for Studies on Spear Phishing Attacks

Despite significant advancements in security technologies, phishing attacks continue to be rampant and successful because distinguishing phishing emails from real messages remains difficult to most end-users, mainly the targeted kind known as spear-phishing. There is a severe lack of human factor studies on spear-phishing attacks due to lack of methods and datasets. We have designed a novel multi-player synthetic task environment, called SpearSim, for conducting laboratory experiments on spear-phishing attacks. Using SpearSim, we have conducted an experiment to understand how information exploitation in spear-phishing attacks influences end-user decision-making. This paper describes the SpearSim system’s design and discusses the results from the experiment conducted with SpearSim. The experiment results show that people are more vulnerable to spear-phishing attacks when attackers can explore and exploit different kinds of personal information available to them about their targets. We discuss the implications of this research for the design of anti-phishing training solutions and privacy enhancing technologies.

Building a Synthetic Task Environment to Support Artificial Social Intelligence Research

To support research on artificial social intelligence for successful teams (ASIST), an urban search and rescue task (USAR) was simulated within Minecraft to serve as a Synthetic Task Environment (STE). The goal for the development of the present STE was to create an environment that provides ample opportunities to allow ASI agents to demonstrate the theory of mind by making inferences and predictions of humans’ states and actions in the USAR task environment, and in the future to intervene to improve teamwork in real-time. This paper describes the STE design background, design potentials and considerations, rich data collection opportunities, and potential usage for more broad research.

Developing Human-Robot Team Interdependence in a Synthetic Task Environment

In future urban search and rescue teams, robots may be expected to conduct cognitive tasks. As the capabilities of robots change, so too will their interdependence with human teammates. Human factors and cognitive engineering are well-positioned to guide the design of autonomy for effective teaming. Previous work in the urban search and rescue synthetic task environment (USAR-STE) used Minecraft, a customizable gaming platform. In this effort, we advanced the USAR-STE by increasing interdependence in dyadic human-robot teaming through the Coactive Design framework. In this framework, we defined required capacities of victim identification in USAR from literature, and used them as inputs for modeling interdependence, and determined recommendations that would enhance interdependence in the task environment. Although Coactive Design is typically used to design interdependence for robots or jobs, we demonstrated how it can also be used to design an experimental team task environment.