arXiv subjects

Paschal Amusuo

Publications and source records attributed to Paschal Amusuo.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Reproducibility is Not Enough: Artifact Verifiability in Decentralized-Build Package Ecosystems

Reproducible and verifiable builds increase trust in distributed software artifacts by enabling independent parties to detect artifacts produced by compromised build or release pipelines. However, artifact verification requires more than deterministic builds: a verifier must also recover the source state, build environment, dependencies, and build instructions that produced the artifact. Decentralized-build ecosystems make this difficult because artifacts are produced through heterogeneous tools, maintainer-controlled workflows, and fragmented metadata. As a result, it remains unclear how often artifacts in these ecosystems can be independently verified. This paper studies artifact verifiability across four popular decentralized-build package ecosystems. We define an independent verifier model that relies only on registry-derivable metadata and an artifact comparison model with tiered equivalence levels. We implement these models in an Artifact Verification Pipeline and use it to measure artifact verifiability across the target ecosystems. Our results show that, beyond build determinism, verifiability is limited by missing source and build metadata, implicit release transformations, and unconventional build practices. Provenance attestations and embedded VCS metadata improve verification, but they do not provide complete rebuild specifications. These findings identify concrete metadata gaps and ecosystem-level changes needed to make artifact verification practical at package-registry scale.

cs.SE↗

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↗