Fidelity of Statistical Reporting in 10 Years of Cyber Security User Studies

Studies in socio-technical aspects of security often rely on user studies and statistical inferences on investigated relations to make their case. They, thereby, enable practitioners and scientists alike to judge on the validity and reliability of the research undertaken. To ascertain this capacity, we investigated the reporting fidelity of security user studies. Based on a systematic literature review of 114 user studies in cyber security from selected venues in the 10 years 2006-2016, we evaluated fidelity of the reporting of 1775 statistical inferences using the R package statcheck. We conducted a systematic classification of incomplete reporting, reporting inconsistencies and decision errors, leading to multinomial logistic regression (MLR) on the impact of publication venue/year as well as a comparison to a compatible field of psychology. We found that half the cyber security user studies considered reported incomplete results, in stark difference to comparable results in a field of psychology. Our MLR on analysis outcomes yielded a slight increase of likelihood of incomplete tests over time, while SOUPS yielded a few percent greater likelihood to report statistics correctly than other venues. In this study, we offer the first fully quantitative analysis of the stateof-play of socio-technical studies in security. While we highlight the impact and prevalence of incomplete reporting, we also offer fine-grained diagnostics and recommendations on how to respond to the situation.