Home computer users present unique challenges to computer security. A user's actions frequently affect security without the user understanding how. Moreover, whereas some home users are quite adept at protecting their machines from security threats, a vast majority are not. Current generation security tools, unfortunately, do not tailor security to the home user's needs and actions. In this work, we propose Personalized Attack Graphs (PAG) as a formal technique to model the security risks for the home computer informed by a profile of the user attributes such as preferences, threat perceptions and activities. A PAG also models the interplay between user activities and preferences, attacker strategies, and system activities within the system risk model. We develop a formal model of a user profile to personalize a single, monolithic PAG to different users, and show how to use the user profile to predict user actions.

The home computer user is often said to be the weakest link in computer security. They do not always follow security advice, and they take actions, as in phishing, that compromise themselves. In general, we do not understand why users do not always behave safely, which would seem to be in their best interest. This paper reviews the literature of surveys and studies of factors that influence security decisions for home computer users. We organize the review in four sections: understanding of threats, perceptions of risky behavior, efforts to avoid security breaches and attitudes to security interventions. We find that these studies reveal a lot of reasons why current security measures may not match the needs or abilities of home computer users and suggest future work needed to inform how security is delivered to this user group.