DOI: 10.5176/2251-2195_CSEIT16.53
Authors: Abdulwaheed Johnson and Anthony Joseph
Abstract: The past decade has seen a considerable increase in the use of mobile devices, especially with smartphones. This widespread adoption of smart mobile devices has led to a surge in mobile e-commerce (m-commerce) with the inherent security risk associated with transacting business from mobile devices. Mobile phones and tablets account for at least 35% of e-commerce traffic, and is projected to generate US$669 billion by 2018. To encourage unabated adoption and growth of m-commerce, it is imperative to find solutions to the security issues plaguing the industry. This paper examines m-commerce and its associated security risks. It provides the results of a survey on the end user perception of mobile device security ecosystem. The survey was carried out on 150 end users, their responses were quantitatively assessed, and subsequently a security consciousness index/score was assigned to each user. These scores were then used to test the three following hypotheses: an end user who is a computing professional has better smart phone security consciousness than an individual without a computing background; a student majoring in the computing field has better smart phone security consciousness than a student who is not majoring in computing; and an individual with three months or less computing education or experience is less security conscious than someone with three years or more computing education or experience. While the first null hypothesis was not rejected using the Mann-Whitney test and 2-sample t-test, the second and third hypotheses were rejected using the 1-sample z-test, and verified using a 1-sample t-test. These results showed that in the statistical sense, computing professionals demonstrated greater mobile security consciousness as compared to the other groups of individuals.
Keywords: mobile devices; mobile commerce; electronic commerce; mobile security; survey; security consciousness index
Updating...