arXiv subjects

Jesse Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Jesse Chen.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

An Investigation into Protestware

Protests are public expressions of personal or collective discontent with the current state of affairs. Although traditional protests involve in-person events, the ubiquity of computers and software opened up a new avenue for activism: protestware. The roots of protestware date back to the early days of computing. However, recent events in the Russo-Ukrainian war has sparked a new wave of protestware. While news and media are heavily reporting on individual protestware as they are discovered, the understanding of such software as a whole is severely limited. In particular, we do not have a detailed understanding of their characteristics and their impact on the community. To address this gap, we first collect 32 samples of protestware. Then, with these samples, we formulate characteristics of protestware using inductive analysis. In addition, we analyze the aftermath of the protestware which has potential to affect the software supply chain in terms of community sentiment and usage. We report that: (1) protestware has three notable characteristics, namely, i) the "nature of inducing protest" is diverse, ii) the "nature of targeting users" is discriminatory, and iii) the "nature of transparency" is not always respected; (2) disruptive protestware may cause substantial adverse impact on downstream users; (3) developers of protestware may not shift their beliefs even with pushback; (4) the usage of protestware from JavaScript libraries has been seen to generally increase over time.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

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↗

arXiv2021

Predictable Bandwidth Slicing with Open vSwitch

Software switching, a.k.a virtual switching, plays a vital role in network virtualization and network function virtualization, enhances configurability, and reduces deployment and operational costs. Software switching also facilitates the development of edge and fog computing networks by allowing the use of commodity hardware for both data processing and packet switching. Despite these benefits, characterizing and ensuring deterministic performance with software switches is harder, compared to physical switching appliances. In particular, achieving deterministic performance is essential to adopt software switching in mission-critical applications, especially those deployed in edge and fog computing architectures. In this paper, we study the impact of switch configurations on bandwidth slicing and predictable packet latency. We demonstrate that latency and predictability are dependent on the implementation of the bandwidth slicing mechanism and that the packet schedulers used in OVS Kernel-Path and OVS-DPDK each focus on different aspects of switching performance.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2015

Performance Comparison Between MIMO and SISO based on Indoor Field Measurements

In this paper, we quantify performance gain achieved if SISO system is replaced with 4x4 MIMO in WLAN setting compatible with IEEE 802.11n standard. We compare throughput and power savings in MIMO by taking field measurements at various indoor locations. Measurements are validated with simulations that include different IEEE TGn channel models. For comparison between MIMO and SISO, we select the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) which yields the highest throughput subject to QoS constraints (PER <10%). We show that throughput gain of 2.5x-3x and power saving of 5-15 dB are achievable in 4x4 MIMO system.

cs.NI↗