Recent years have seen a proliferation of secure device pairing methods that 
try to improve both the usability and security of today's de-facto standard - 
PIN-based authentication. Evaluating such improvements is difficult. Most 
comparative laboratory studies have so far mainly focused on completeness, 
trying to find the single best method among the dozens of proposed approaches 
- one that is both rated the most usable by test subjects, and which provides 
the most robust security guarantees. This search for the "best" pairing 
method, however, fails to take into account the variety of situations in which 
such pairing protocols may be used in real life. The comparative study 
reported here, therefore, explicitly situates pairing tasks in a number of 
more realistic situations. Our results indicate that people do not always use 
the easiest or most popular method - they instead prefer different methods in 
different situations, based on the sensitivity of data involved, their time 
constraints, and the social conventions appropriate for a particular place and 
setting. Our study also provides qualitative data on factors influencing the 
perceived security of a particular method, the users' mental models 
surrounding security of a method, and their security needs.