Remote Attestation Scheme Research Articles

Elevating Security in Migration: An Enhanced Trusted Execution Environment-Based Generic Virtual Remote Attestation Scheme

Cloud computing, as the most widely applied and prominent domain of distributed systems, has brought numerous advantages to users, including high resource sharing efficiency, strong availability, and excellent scalability. However, the complexity of cloud computing environments also introduces various risks and challenges. In the current landscape with numerous cloud service providers and diverse hardware configurations in cloud environments, addressing challenges such as establishing trust chains, achieving general-purpose virtual remote attestation, and ensuring secure virtual machine migration becomes a crucial issue that traditional remote attestation architectures cannot adequately handle. Confronted with these issues in a heterogeneous multi-cloud environment, we present a targeted solution—a secure migration-enabled generic virtual remote attestation architecture based on improved TEE. We introduce a hardware trusted module to establish and bind with a Virtual Root of Trust (VRoT), addressing the challenge of trust chain establishment. Simultaneously, our architecture utilizes the VRoT within TEE to realize a general-purpose virtual remote attestation solution across heterogeneous hardware configurations. Furthermore, we design a controller deployed in the trusted domain to verify migration conditions, facilitate key exchange, and manage the migration process, ensuring the security and integrity of virtual machine migration. Lastly, we conduct rigorous experiments to measure the overhead and performance of our proposed remote attestation scheme and virtual machine secure migration process. The results unequivocally demonstrate that our architecture provides better generality and migration security with only marginal overhead compared to other traditional remote attestation solutions.

TVRAVNF: an efficient low-cost TEE-based virtual remote attestation scheme for virtual network functions

With the continuous advancement of virtualization technology and the widespread adoption of 5G networks, the application of the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) architecture has become increasingly popular and prevalent. While the NFV architecture brings a lot of advantages, it also introduces security challenges, including the effective and efficient verification of the integrity of deployed Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and ensuring the secure operation of VNFs. To address the challenge of efficiently conducting virtual remote attestation for VNFs and establishing trust in virtualized environments like NFV architecture, we propose TVRAVNF, which is a highly efficient and low-cost TEE-based virtual remote attestation scheme for VNFs. The scheme we proposed ensures the security and effectiveness of the virtual remote attestation process by leveraging TEE. Furthermore, we introduces a novel local attestation mechanism, which not only reduces the overall overhead of the virtual remote attestation process but also shortens the attestation interval to mitigate Time-Of-Check-Time-Of-Use attacks, thereby enhancing overall security. We conduct experiments to validate the overhead of the TVRAVNF scheme and compare its performance with that of a typical remote attestation process within a maximum unattested time interval. The experimental results demonstrate that, by employing the local attestation mechanism, our solution achieves nearly an 80% significant performance improvement with a relatively small time overhead for small to medium-sized files. This further substantiates the significant advantages of our approach in both security and efficiency.

SDATA: Symmetrical Device Identifier Composition Engine Complied Aggregate Trust Attestation

Efficient safeguarding of the security of interconnected devices, which are often resource-constrained, can be achieved through collective remote attestation schemes. However, in existing schemes, the attestation keys are independent of the device configuration, leading to increased requirements for the trusted computing base. This paper introduces a symmetrical aggregate trust attestation that is compatible with devices adhering to the device identifier composition engine framework. The proposed scheme simplifies the trusted computing base requirements by generating an attestation key that is derived from the device configuration. Moreover, the scheme employs distributed aggregate message authentication codes to reduce both the communication volume within the device network and the size of the attestation report, thereby enhancing the aggregation efficiency. In addition, the scheme incorporates interactive authentication to accurately identify compromised devices.

PROVE: Provable remote attestation for public verifiability

The expanding attack surface of Internet of Things (IoT) systems calls for innovative security approaches to verify the reliability of IoT devices. To this end, Remote Attestation (RA) serves as a key mechanism that remotely detects the presence of malware in IoT devices. Typically, RA allows a centralized trusted Verifier to retrieve reliable evidence about the software integrity of an untrusted Prover. Existing RA schemes generally rely on the assumption that the Verifier and the Prover know each other and have pre-shared cryptographic keys during the bootstrap phase. However, these assumptions are not realistic to employ over commonly used event-driven IoT networks, in which the interacting parties do not know each other and do not communicate directly.This paper proposes PROVE, a novel protocol that allows many Verifiers to attest one or more Provers without pre-shared key material and without using public-key cryptography which is often not suitable for resource-constraint IoT devices. In particular, PROVE considers a realistic IoT system where devices adopt the publish/subscribe communication paradigm. In PROVE, the subscribers act as untrusted Verifiers and attest not only the firmware integrity of the publishers that act as untrusted Provers but also the authenticity of the received data originated from these publishers. We simulate PROVE on the Contiki emulator and demonstrate the scalability of the solution. We also validate PROVE through two hardware proof-of-concept implementations: PROVE and PROVE+, which rely on different cryptographic cores. The results show that a complete execution of the protocol takes 4605 ns and 324 ns for PROVE and PROVE+, respectively.

A Software-Based Remote Attestation Scheme for Internet of Things Devices

With the rapid development of intelligent applications, many Internet of Things (IoT) devices are deployed in various application scenarios, playing an extremely important role. Remote attestation is an important method to ensure the software integrity of these devices and protect them from several attacks. Due to the lack of security hardware and no support of hardware extensions for Class-1 IoT devices, it is particularly important to design a suitable remote attestation scheme for these devices. In this paper, we first propose the delayed observation mechanism to alleviate the problem that the software-based remote attestation scheme is not suitable for wireless networks. At the same time, we propose a "filling memory at attestation-time" mechanism, which solves the problem that attackers hide malicious code through return-oriented programming. Finally, we introduce a reputation mechanism to assist our attestation, and adopt the principle of "making higher-performance verification nodes take on more work" to greatly reduce the time-consuming attestation. We analyze the security of the scheme and implement it on a UNO-R3 development board to prove its practicability and effectiveness. Compared with traditional software-based attestation schemes, our scheme can reduce the attestation time and resist proxy attacks.

Memory Offloading for Remote Attestation of Multi-Service IoT Devices.

Remote attestation (RA) is an effective malware detection mechanism that allows a trusted entity (Verifier) to detect a potentially compromised remote device (Prover). The recent research works are proposing advanced Control-Flow Attestation (CFA) protocols that are able to trace the Prover’s execution flow to detect runtime attacks. Nevertheless, several memory regions remain unattested, leaving the Prover vulnerable to data memory and mobile adversaries. Multi-service devices, whose integrity is also dependent on the integrity of any attached external peripheral devices, are particularly vulnerable to such attacks. This paper extends the state-of-the-art RA schemes by presenting ERAMO, a protocol that attests larger memory regions by adopting the memory offloading approach. We validate and evaluate ERAMO with a hardware proof-of-concept implementation using a TrustZone-capable LPC55S69 running two sensor nodes. We enhance the protocol by providing extensive memory analysis insights for multi-service devices, demonstrating that it is possible to analyze and attest the memory of the attached peripherals. Experiments confirm the feasibility and effectiveness of ERAMO in attesting dynamic memory regions.

A survey of remote attestation in Internet of Things: Attacks, countermeasures, and prospects

The explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices is an inevitable trend, especially considering the fact that 5G technology facilitates numerous services building on IoT devices. IoT devices deliver great convenience to our daily lives; nevertheless, they are becoming attractive attacking targets. Compromised IoT devices can result in the exposure of user privacy, damage to network security, or even threats to personal safety. In a rush for convenience and marketability, the security of these devices is usually less considered during production and even ignored. Under these circumstances, Remote Attestation (RA) becomes a valuable security service. It outsources the computation and verification burden to a resource-rich party, e.g., server, to ease its on-device implementation, making it suitable for protocol extensions.In this paper, we investigate the state-of-the-art RA schemes from different perspectives, aiming to offer a comprehensive understanding of this security service. Specifically, we summarize the basis of RA. We set up an elaborate adversarial model by systematizing existing RA schemes. Then we put forward the evaluation criteria from protection capability, performance, network adaptability, and attestation quality. According to the adversarial model, we classify existing RA schemes into five categories to show the various characteristics. A comparison of representative proposals enables readers to adopt and design suitable protocols in different application scenarios. Finally, we discuss some open challenges and provision prospects for future research.

State-of-the-Art Software-Based Remote Attestation: Opportunities and Open Issues for Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem comprises billions of heterogeneous Internet-connected devices which are revolutionizing many domains, such as healthcare, transportation, smart cities, to mention only a few. Along with the unprecedented new opportunities, the IoT revolution is creating an enormous attack surface for potential sophisticated cyber attacks. In this context, Remote Attestation (RA) has gained wide interest as an important security technique to remotely detect adversarial presence and assure the legitimate state of an IoT device. While many RA approaches proposed in the literature make different assumptions regarding the architecture of IoT devices and adversary capabilities, most typical RA schemes rely on minimal Root of Trust by leveraging hardware that guarantees code and memory isolation. However, the presence of a specialized hardware is not always a realistic assumption, for instance, in the context of legacy IoT devices and resource-constrained IoT devices. In this paper, we survey and analyze existing software-based RA schemes (i.e., RA schemes not relying on specialized hardware components) through the lens of IoT. In particular, we provide a comprehensive overview of their design characteristics and security capabilities, analyzing their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we discuss the opportunities that these RA schemes bring in attesting legacy and resource-constrained IoT devices, along with open research issues.

A Taxonomy and Review of Remote Attestation Schemes in Embedded Systems

Embedded systems that make up the Internet of Things (IoT), Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) networks, and Smart Grid applications are coming under increasing scrutiny in the security field. Remote Attestation (RA) is a security mechanism that allows a trusted device, the verifier, to determine the trustworthiness of an untrusted device, the prover. RA has become an area of high interest in academia and industry and many research works on RA have been published in recent years. This paper reviewed the published RA research works from 2003-2020. Our contributions are fourfold. First, we have re-framed the problem of RA into 5 smaller problems: root of trust, evidence type, evidence gathering, packaging and verification, and scalability. We have provided a holistic review of RA by discussing the relationships between these problems and the various solutions that exist in modern RA research. Second, we have presented an enhanced threat model that allows for a greater understanding of the security benefits of a given RA scheme. Third, we have proposed a taxonomy to classify and analyze RA research works and use it to categorize 58 RA schemes reported in literature. Fourth, we have provided cost benefit analysis details of each RA scheme surveyed such that security professionals may perform a cost benefit analysis in the context of their own challenges. Our classification and analysis has revealed areas of future research that have not been addressed by researchers rigorously.

ARCADIS: Asynchronous Remote Control-Flow Attestation of Distributed IoT Services

Remote attestation (RA) is a security mechanism that verifies the trustworthiness of remote IoT devices. Traditional RA protocols aim to detect the presence of malicious code in the static memory of a device. In the IoT domain, RA research is currently following two main directions: Dynamic RA and Swarm RA. Dynamic RA schemes intend to detect runtime attacks that hijack the control-flow execution of a running program without injecting new malicious code into the memory. On the other hand, swarm RA protocols focus on attesting efficiently and effectively a large number of IoT devices. However, existing RA protocols do not perform dynamic attestation in asynchronous IoT networks. This paper proposes a RA protocol for Asynchronous Remote Control-Flow Attestation of Distributed IoT Services (ARCADIS). This protocol extends the state-of-the-art by detecting IoT devices that have (directly or indirectly) been maliciously influenced by runtime attacks on asynchronous distributed IoT services. The protocol has been simulated for Wismote sensors in the Contiki emulator. The conducted experiments confirm the feasibility of ARCADIS and demonstrate its practicality for small IoT networks.

TZ-MRAS: A Remote Attestation Scheme for the Mobile Terminal Based on ARM TrustZone

With the widespread use of mobile embedded devices in the Internet of Things, mobile office, and edge computing, security issues are becoming more and more serious. Remote attestation, one of the mobile security solutions, is a process of verifying the identity and integrity status of the remote computing device, through which the challenger determines whether the platform is trusted by discovering an unknown fingerprint. The remote attestation on the mobile terminal faces many security challenges presently because there is a lack of trusted roots, devices are heterogeneous, and hardware resources are strictly limited. To ARM’s mobile platform, we propose a mobile remote attestation scheme based on ARM TrustZone (TZ-MRAS), which uses the highest security authority of TrustZone to implement trusted attestation service. Compared with the existing mobile remote attestation scheme, it has the advantages of wide application, easy deployment, and low cost. To defend against the time-of-check-to-time-of-use (TOC-TOU) attack, we propose a probe-based dynamic integrity measurement model, ProbeIMA, which can dynamically detect unknown fingerprints that generate during kernel and process execution. Finally, according to the characteristics of the improved dynamic measurement model, that is, the ProbeIMA will expand the scale of the measurement dataset, an optimized stored measurement log construction algorithm based on the locality principle (LPSML) is proposed, which has the advantages of shortening the length of the authentication path and improving the verification efficiency of the platform configuration. As a proof of concept, we implemented a prototype for each service and made experimental evaluations. The experimental results show the proposed scheme has higher security and efficiency than some existing schemes.

Remote Attestation for Intelligent Electronic Devices in Smart Grid Based on Trusted Level Measurement

To reduce the implementation complexity and excessive overhead caused by remote attestation, we propose a new remote attestation scheme based on trusted level measurement considering the limited system resources of the Intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) in smart grid. In this scheme, a lightweight trusted level measurement mechanism is designed, and a new dynamic weighted multi-classifier integration method based on Binary tree Support vector machine (BT-SVM) is proposed. The trusted level of configuration information and running state of an IED are measured through trusted third party. The measurement parameters and attestation period are dynamically adjusted according to different trusted levels of an IED, so that reducing computational overhead and communication delays in remote attestation process. Analysis and experiments show that the proposed scheme can enhance the security of IEDs in smart grid by occupying a small amount of computation and communication resources.

Remote Attestation for Intelligent Electronic Devices in Smart Grid Based on Trusted Level Measurement

To reduce the implementation complexity and excessive overhead caused by remote attestation, we propose a new remote attestation scheme based on trusted level measurement considering the limited system resources of the Intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) in smart grid. In this scheme, a lightweight trusted level measurement mechanism is designed, and a new dynamic weighted multi-classifier integration method based on Binary tree Support vector machine (BT-SVM) is proposed. The trusted level of configuration information and running state of an IED are measured through trusted third party. The measurement parameters and attestation period are dynamically adjusted according to different trusted levels of an IED, so that reducing computational overhead and communication delays in remote attestation process. Analysis and experiments show that the proposed scheme can enhance the security of IEDs in smart grid by occupying a small amount of computation and communication resources.

Mutual authentication‐based RA scheme for embedded systems

To improve the security and efficiency of remote attestation (RA) for embedded systems, this study proposes mutual authentication-based RA scheme for embedded systems. Especially, the authors design an RA framework based on authentication agents and measurement agents, which combines the mutually anonymous identity authentication scheme with the platform integrity attestation. During the identity authentication period, based on the traditional direct anonymous authentication scheme, the time-stamping mechanism and the mutual direct anonymous attestation mechanism are proposed to achieve bidirectional anonymous authentication of both parties in the communication. During the platform integrity attestation period, combining with the locality principle, they improve the data structure for storing the integrity measurements of the module and propose an RA mechanism based on locality principle-based hash tree. This mechanism can shorten the length of the certification path and improve the verification efficiency of platform configuration integrity certification. Furthermore, experimental results and analysis show that the efficiency of the proposed scheme is superior to the existing schemes.

Collective Remote Attestation at the Internet of Things Scale: State-of-the-Art and Future Challenges

In recent years, the booming of Internet of Things (IoT) has populated the world with billions of smart devices that implement novel services and applications. The potential for cyberattacks on IoT systems have called for new solutions from the research community. Remote attestation is a widely used technique that allows a verifier to identify software compromise on a remote platform (called prover). Traditional challenge-response remote attestation protocols between the verifier and a single prover face a severe scalability challenge when they are applied to large scale IoT systems. To tackle this issue, recently researchers have started developing attestation schemes, which we refer to as Collective Remote Attestation (CRA) schemes, that are capable of remotely performing attestation of large networks of IoT devices. In this paper, after providing the reader with a background on remote attestation, we survey and analyze existing CRA schemes. We present an analysis of their advantages and disadvantages, as well as of their effectiveness against a reference attacker model. We focus our attention on CRA schemes’ characteristics and adversarial mitigation capabilities. We finally highlight open research issues and give possible directions for mitigating both the limitations of existing schemes, and new emerging challenges. We believe this work can help guiding the design of current and future proposals for CRA.

ESDRA: An Efficient and Secure Distributed Remote Attestation Scheme for IoT Swarms

An Internet of Things (IoT) system generally contains thousands of heterogeneous devices which often operate in swarms—large, dynamic, and self-organizing networks. Remote attestation is an important cornerstone for the security of these IoT swarms, as it ensures the software integrity of swarm devices and protects them from attacks. However, current attestation schemes suffer from single point of failure verifier. In this paper, we propose an Efficient and Secure Distributed Remote Attestation (ESDRA) scheme for IoT swarms. We present the first many-to-one attestation scheme for device swarms, which reduces the possibility of single point of failure verifier. Moreover, we utilize distributed attestation to verify the integrity of each node and apply accusation mechanism to report the invaded nodes, which makes ESDRA much easier to feedback the certain compromised nodes and reduces the run-time of attestation. We analyze the security of ESDRA and do some simulation experiments to show its practicality and efficiency. Especially, ESDRA can significantly reduce the attestation time and has a better performance in the energy consumption comparing with list-based attestation schemes.

S The Security MicroVisor: A Formally-Verified Software-Based Security Architecture for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is shaped by the increasing number of low-cost Internet-connected embedded devices that are becoming ubiquitous in every aspect of modern life. With their cost-sensitive design, integrating hardware-based security mechanisms into such devices is undesirable. Therefore, securing these devices is a particularly difficult challenge, especially, due to their growing popularity as attack targets, via remote malware infestations. The vast majority of such devices are bare-metal, where they execute programs in fully-accessible and unprotected memories without any operating system and even without including any form of security. This is beside the fact that IoToperating systems offer little or no protection. This paper addresses this problem through the concept of a Security MicroVisor (S <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">μ</sub> V), which provides embedded devices that lack hardware-based memory protection units with memory isolation using software virtualisation and assembly-level code verification. More specifically, our contribution is two-fold. First, we propose S <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">μ</sub> V as a software-based memory isolation technique. We then formally verify the software architecture, written in C, to prove that it is memory-safe and crash-free. Second, we propose a software-based remote attestation, as an example of a fundamental security service that can be implemented on top of S <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">μ</sub> V, to detect malware-infected devices. We first describe the design and implementation of S <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">μ</sub> V. Then, we highlight the formal verification of software architecture, and characterize the remote attestation protocol. We evaluate the S <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">μ</sub> V implementation using an 8-bit AVR microcontroller that is widely used in IoT devices. Evaluation results show that S <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">μ</sub> V provides strong security guarantees while maintaining extremely low overhead in terms of memory footprint, performance, and power consumption. Furthermore, we extend the performance evaluation also to the remote attestation scheme, illustrating its limited overhead.

An efficient anonymous remote attestation scheme for trusted computing based on improved CPK

An efficient anonymous remote attestation scheme for trusted computing based on improved CPK

CENSOR: Cloud‐enabled secure IoT architecture over SDN paradigm

SummaryThe cyber‐security threats to low‐cost end‐user devices could severely undermine the expected deployment of Internet of Thing (IoT) solutions in a range of real‐world applications such as environment monitoring, transportation, and manufacturing. Additionally, the huge amount of data generated by these devices posses new challenges concerning tasks such as efficient information acquisition and analysis, decision making, and action implementation. In this paper, we propose CENSOR, a novel cloud‐enabled secure IoT network architecture based on SDN paradigm. We discuss the significant benefits as well as challenges that are inherent while performing integration of SDN and IoT in CENSOR. We show that the emerging software‐based networking features combined with the cloud computing solutions can significantly improve the security and communication reliability in the target IoT scenarios. In particular, to provide the adequate security measures in the network, CENSOR uses a lightweight and scalable software remote attestation scheme, which ensures the integrity of the software that is being executed by the IoT devices to achieve the application specific goals in the network. We further discuss the improvements in data communication and data overhead that can be achieved in CENSOR due to its convergence with the cloud computing (at back‐end) and fog computing services (at edge routers or front‐end). A Smart City use‐case has been considered as a target IoT scenario to analyze the feasibility and effectiveness of CENSOR concerning the communication security and the network scalability parameters. Additionally, we provide future research directions along with the recent industry initiatives that include open issues in the integration and deployment of cloud‐enabled SDN‐based IoT networks.

SARA: Sandwiched attestation through remote agents for cluster-based wireless sensor networks

Cluster-based wireless sensor networks have advantages of scalability and efficient communication. However, a major security risk to cluster heads is a malicious code injection attack through which an adversary can completely control a cluster network to deliver fake data and obtain private data. Memory attestation scheme is an effective mechanism for attesting the firmware integrity of an embedded device. Unfortunately, existing hardware-based remote attestation scheme relying on a trusted platform module incurs a considerable storage overhead to cluster heads. Therefore, this article proposes a lightweight hardware-based remote attestation scheme that comprises two remote attestation protocols. A lightweight hardware security module without executing any complicated cryptographic computation is employed and can substantially reduce the development cost and energy consumption compared with the trusted platform module. In the proposed scheme, a base station can attest each individual cluster head while all cluster nodes can simultaneously attest their cluster head in regular intervals. Performance analysis indicates that the storage requirement for cluster heads is independent of the number of attestation sessions. Furthermore, the computational cost of cluster nodes for the proposed scheme is comparable to that of the trusted platform module–based scheme. The proposed scheme is particularly suitable for long-term applications based on lightweight cluster heads.