Poster: Project Leine - A Virtualized Study Infrastructure

Poster

Abstract

Conducting human subjects experiments is a crucial aspect of usable security and privacy research. These human subjects studies are contingent of the participation of end-users, administrators, security workers, developers, briefly: all actors involved in shaping computer security and privacy. However, the recruitment of large and diverse samples for complex experiments can be challenging. Running online studies on platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk makes the recruitment of large samples easy but is limited to end-users and relatively simple experiment scenarios, e.g., online surveys. Laboratory studies allow more complex experiments and the recruitment of different types of participants, e.g., software developers but are limited to geographically restricted samples. Additionally, laboratory studies can be time-intensive and expensive, and invite laboratory bias.

In this poster, we present work in progress to overcome the above limitations. We illustrate and discuss the design and implementation details of a virtualized experiment infrastructure that allows a similar complexity and internal validity as laboratory studies and the recruitment of large and diverse samples of different types of participants. The infrastructure provides an entirely virtual desktop environment using state of the art JavaScript based VNC technology in a browser. Participants only need a modern browser to access the infrastructure. Researchers can configure the virtual environment according to their requirements, including the installation of software or collecting telemetry data.

While still work in progress, the poster illustrates key contributions of our work and future research enabled by the project.

Reference

@misc{poster/ndss/wermke19a,
 author = {Dominik Wermke and
Nicolas Huaman and
Christian Stransky and
Yasemin Acar and
Sascha Fahl},
 howpublished = {In 26th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2019, San Diego, California, USA, February 24-27, 2019},
 month = {Feb},
 title = {Project Leine - A Virtualized Study Infrastructure},
 url = {https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/ndss2019posters_paper_41.pdf},
 year = {2019}
}