Quantifying Users' Beliefs about Software Updates

Abstract

Abstract-Software updates are critical to the performance, compatibility, and security of software systems. However, users do not always install updates, leaving their machines vulnerable to attackers' exploits. While recent studies have highlighted numerous reasons why users ignore updates, little is known about how prevalent each of these beliefs is. Gaining a better understanding of the prevalence of each belief may help software designers better target their efforts in understanding what specific user concerns to address when developing and deploying software updates. In our study, we performed a survey to quantify the prevalence of users' reasons for not updating uncovered by previous studies. We used this data to derive three factors underlying these beliefs: update costs, update necessity, and update risks. Based on our results, we provide recommendations for how software developers can better improve users' software updating experiences, thereby increasing compliance and, with it, security.

Transferring Update Behavior from Smartphones to Smart Consumer Devices

“…The formative field study showed that participants like to maintain control over installed software. They preferred to update apps they considered important and influence the installation time to avoid bugs and data-loss, confirming previous work [5,15,25,26].…”

“…Satisfaction with the current software version, undesired UI changes, the perceived lack of purpose of software updates, and negative prior update experiences hinder participants from updating [26]. Mathur et al [15] found that 40.5% of participants thought about the costs of updating, 29.2% considered the necessity of updates before installing, and 7.5% were concerned about the potential risk of updating. We extend Mathur et al's work with a focus on smartphones and smart consumer devices.…”

“…[after Backup (15), Threat of data loss intimidating (9)] Preferred not to say 2 a The above average scores for conscientiousness and agreeableness are noteworthy, since they correlate with increased security awareness [9].…”

“…Update behaviors and attitudes on desktops and smartphones are well studied [3][4][5]7,[12][13][14][15][23][24][25][26][27]. However, smart consumer devices with minimalistic user interfaces (UIs) and inconspicuous computing power became common after the Internet-of-Things emerged.…”

“Anyone Else Seeing this Error?”: Community, System Administrators, and Patch Information

“…It therefore comes as no surprise that end-users avoid or delay updating, inadvertently increasing their vulnerability time frame [48], [54]. Reasons for the circumventing updates include annoying interruptions to users' workflows [47], [49], [55], or confusing and unwelcome UI alterations [48], [54], [56], [57].…”