# User Modelling Validation over the Security Awareness of Digital Natives
## 1 Introduction  
Mobile devices tend to become an indispensable part of our everyday life, by fulfilling the increasing user need for access to services and information, without time or location related restrictions. Therefore, the proliferation of such devices and increased user dependency promoted the transmutation of mobile devices to multifunctional equipment, where their increasing computational and storage capacity allow them to provide critical services with significant security implications. Accordingly, mobile devices (i.e., cell phones, tablets, and laptops) store and process critical information, associated with their owners but also people, legal entities and infrastructure related to them.  
Furthermore, users tend to seek access to services being unaware or uninterested on the potential associated risks [1; 2; 3], while they become accustomed to continuous connectivity. Therefore, such practices are common even across networks with unknown configurations, while they are likely to leave users vulnerable to unauthorized access, allowing associated risks to materialize into attacks. Therefore, vulnerabilities arising from user-behavior or design shortcomings can facilitate malicious activity, allowing adversaries to launch attacks that can lead to privacy breaches and identity theft. In light of this actuality, it is important that users are aware of the associated risks, and, more importantly, that the developed systems and services are adjusted to realistic user models.  
This article builds on our earlier study on the security awareness of digital natives [4], where we examined the behavior of this group with respect to their educational background and levels of security competence. This initial study allowed us to establish an understanding and extract related findings over the security awareness and behavior of digital natives within four focus areas: (i) Use of Mobile Devices; (ii) Connectivity and Network Access; (iii) Management of Credentials; and (iv) Protection mechanisms. Specifically, this study investigates how well the security experts manage to predict the user behavior of the digital natives within the four areas above.  
Nevertheless, due to the intrusive nature of these technologies and increasing dependency for the execution of daily tasks, educating the users over security-related best practices can only take us halfway towards securing this environment. One of the findings of the aforementioned study was that digital natives are willing to compromise access to services in favor of security, when they are provided with usable solutions. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate how users are modeled during the design or analysis phases of such systems since deviations between user-behavior and user-models can promote security analyses and design decisions with opposite results. Consequently, this article seeks to utilize the findings of our initial study, in order to investigate the conceptual understanding of security experts with respect to the user behavior of digital natives.  
The remaining of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents related work, while Section 3 sets the scope of this study by identifying the utilized methodologies and sample areas. Consequently, Section 4 presented the results across the aforementioned focus areas, and Section 5 provides a summary of results and discussion. The article continues with a reference to the limitations, suggestions for future work and the conclusions.