Security Behavior Observatory: Infrastructure for Long-term Monitoring of Client Machines (CMU-CyLab-14-009)

Much of the data researchers usually eollect about users' privacy and security behavior comes from short-term studies and focuses on speellic, narrow activities. We present a design arehitecture for the Seeurity Behavior Observatory (SBO), a client-server infrastructure designed to eollect a wide array of data on user and computer behavior from a panel of hundreds of participants over several years. The SBO infrastructure had to be carefully designed to fulfill several requirements. First, the SBO must scale with the desired length, breadth, and depth of data collection. Second, we must take extraordinary care to ensure the seeurity and privacy of the collected data, which will inevitably include intimate details about our participants' behavior. Third, the SBO must serve our research interests, which will inevitably change over the eourse of the study, as eollected data is analyzed, interpreted, and suggest further lines of inquiry. We describe in detail the SBO infrastructure, its secure data eollection methods, the benefits of our design and implementation, as well as the hurdles and tradeoll's to consider when designing such a data eollection system.