arXiv subjects

James C Davis

Publications and source records attributed to James C Davis.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

A Guide to Stakeholder Analysis for Cybersecurity Researchers

Stakeholder-based ethics analysis is now a formal requirement for submissions to top cybersecurity research venues. This requirement reflects a growing consensus that cybersecurity researchers must go beyond providing capabilities to anticipating and mitigating the potential harms thereof. However, many cybersecurity researchers may be uncertain about how to proceed in an ethics analysis. In this guide, we provide practical support for that requirement by enumerating stakeholder types and mapping them to common empirical research methods. We also offer worked examples to demonstrate how researchers can identify likely stakeholder exposures in real-world projects. Our goal is to help research teams meet new ethics mandates with confidence and clarity, not confusion.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

LEMIX: Enabling Testing of Embedded Applications as Linux Applications (Extended Report)

Dynamic analysis, through rehosting, is an important capability for security assessment in embedded systems software. Existing rehosting techniques aim to provide high-fidelity execution by accurately emulating hardware and peripheral interactions. However, these techniques face challenges in adoption due to the increasing number of available peripherals and the complexities involved in designing emulation models for diverse hardware. Additionally, contrary to the prevailing belief that guides existing works, our analysis of reported bugs shows that high-fidelity execution is not required to expose most bugs in embedded software. Our key hypothesis is that security vulnerabilities are more likely to arise at higher abstraction levels. To substantiate our hypothesis, we introduce LEMIX, a framework enabling dynamic analysis of embedded applications by rehosting them as x86 Linux applications decoupled from hardware dependencies. Enabling embedded applications to run natively on Linux facilitates security analysis using available techniques and takes advantage of the powerful hardware available on the Linux platform for higher testing throughput. We develop various techniques to address the challenges involved in converting embedded applications to Linux applications. We evaluated LEMIX on 18 real-world embedded applications across four RTOSes and found 21 new bugs in 12 of the applications and all 4 of the RTOS kernels. We report that LEMIX is superior to existing state-of-the-art techniques both in terms of code coverage (~2x more coverage) and bug detection (18 more bugs).

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

On the Contents and Utility of IoT Cybersecurity Guidelines

Cybersecurity concerns of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and infrastructure are growing each year. In response, organizations worldwide have published IoT security guidelines to protect their citizens and customers by providing recommendations on the development and operation of IoT systems. While these guidelines are being adopted, e.g. by US federal contractors, their content and merits have not been critically examined. Specifically, we do not know what topics and recommendations they cover and their effectiveness at preventing real-world IoT failures. In this paper, we address these gaps through a qualitative study of guidelines. We collect 142 IoT cybersecurity guidelines and sample them for recommendations until reaching saturation at 25 guidelines. From the resulting 958 unique recommendations, we iteratively develop a hierarchical taxonomy following grounded theory coding principles and study the guidelines' comprehensiveness. In addition, we evaluate the actionability and specificity of each recommendation and match recommendations to CVEs and security failures in the news they can prevent. We report that: (1) Each guideline has gaps in its topic coverage and comprehensiveness; (2) 87.2% recommendations are actionable and 38.7% recommendations can prevent specific threats; and (3) although the union of the guidelines mitigates all 17 of the failures from our news stories corpus, 21% of the CVEs evade the guidelines. In summary, we report shortcomings in each guideline's depth and breadth, but as a whole they address major security issues.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Signing in Four Public Software Package Registries: Quantity, Quality, and Influencing Factors

Many software applications incorporate open-source third-party packages distributed by public package registries. Guaranteeing authorship along this supply chain is a challenge. Package maintainers can guarantee package authorship through software signing. However, it is unclear how common this practice is, and whether the resulting signatures are created properly. Prior work has provided raw data on registry signing practices, but only measured single platforms, did not consider quality, did not consider time, and did not assess factors that may influence signing. We do not have up-to-date measurements of signing practices nor do we know the quality of existing signatures. Furthermore, we lack a comprehensive understanding of factors that influence signing adoption. This study addresses this gap. We provide measurements across three kinds of package registries: traditional software (Maven, PyPI), container images (DockerHub), and machine learning models (Hugging Face). For each registry, we describe the nature of the signed artifacts as well as the current quantity and quality of signatures. Then, we examine longitudinal trends in signing practices. Finally, we use a quasi-experiment to estimate the effect that various factors had on software signing practices. To summarize our findings: (1) mandating signature adoption improves the quantity of signatures; (2) providing dedicated tooling improves the quality of signing; (3) getting started is the hard part -- once a maintainer begins to sign, they tend to continue doing so; and (4) although many supply chain attacks are mitigable via signing, signing adoption is primarily affected by registry policy rather than by public knowledge of attacks, new engineering standards, etc. These findings highlight the importance of software package registry managers and signing infrastructure.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

A First Look at the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Open-Source Software

This poster describes work on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in open-source software. Although open-source software is commonly integrated into regulated software, and thus must be engineered or adapted for compliance, we do not know how such laws impact open-source software development. We surveyed open-source developers (N=47) to understand their experiences and perceptions of GDPR. We learned many engineering challenges, primarily regarding the management of users' data and assessments of compliance. We call for improved policy-related resources, especially tools to support data privacy regulation implementation and compliance in open-source software.

cs.SE↗