Platform Property Certificate for Property-Based Attestation Model

Trusted Computing Group (TCG) provides a group of prominent computer manufacturers to improve a new technology called Trusted Computing (TC) which can provide a basis to the highest security level in hardware and software. The goal of TCG is to provide a mechanism for security and integrity of computing platforms. Remote attestation is one of the TC aspects which is the method that a system uses to authenticate to a remote party or for a remote party to verify the authenticity of the application. Among other methods of attestation, binary attestation is the TCG standard approach. However, binary attestation mechanism still lacks in flexibility, privacy and scalability and to overcome these problems Property-based Attestation was introduced. Two important issues should be considered in this context: the content of the property and the protocol that we should choose. We proposed Platform Property Certificate based on the current certificates of a system (AIK and SSLcertificates), in our study as the model's property. At the same time, we propose a client-server attestation protocol that can apply this property by using an online Trusted Third Party to verify the trustworthiness of the certificates and measurements of the system. Performance evaluation method in this study is implementation with existing specification and hardware of TC and the criteria that are evaluated are privacy, flexibility and scalability that are compared in the proposed model with the TCG binary attestation model. Comparison and analysis are based on an implemented binary attestation model that are designed to have the same input and output format of our own proposed model to check the results. Results shows that our property is efficient in the case of accepting and rejecting valid and invalid input and our property-based protocol overcomes the deficiencies of lack of flexibility, privacy and scalability in binary attestation mechanism. Therefore the model and the property fulfill the requirements of property-based attestation

Formal analysis of privacy in Direct Anonymous Attestation schemes

This article introduces a definition of privacy for Direct Anonymous Attestation schemes. The definition is expressed as an equivalence property which is suited to automated reasoning using Blanchet's ProVerif. The practicality of the definition is demonstrated by analysing the RSA-based Direct Anonymous Attestation protocol by Brickell, Camenisch & Chen. The analysis discovers a vulnerability in the RSA-based scheme which can be exploited by a passive adversary and, under weaker assumptions, corrupt issuers and verifiers. A security fix is identified and the revised protocol is shown to satisfy our definition of privacy

Remote attestation mechanism for embedded devices based on physical unclonable functions

Remote attestation mechanisms are well studied in the high-end computing environments; however, the same is not true for embedded devices-especially for smart cards. With ever changing landscape of smart card technology and advancements towards a true multi-application platform, verifying the current state of the smart card is significant to the overall security of such proposals. The initiatives proposed by GlobalPlatform Consumer Centric Model (GP-CCM) and User Centric Smart Card Ownership Model (UCOM) enables a user to download any application as she desire-depending upon the authorisation of the application provider. Before an application provider issues an application to a smart card, verifying the current state of the smart card is crucial to the security of the respective application. In this paper, we analyse the rationale behind the remote attestation mechanism for smart cards, and the fundamental features that such a mechanism should possess. We also study the applicability of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) for the remote attestation mechanism and propose two algorithms to achieve the stated features of remote attestation. The proposed algorithms are implemented in a test environment to evaluate their performance. © 2013 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved

PADS: Practical Attestation for Highly Dynamic Swarm Topologies

Remote attestation protocols are widely used to detect device configuration (e.g., software and/or data) compromise in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. Unfortunately, the performances of such protocols are unsatisfactory when dealing with thousands of smart devices. Recently, researchers are focusing on addressing this limitation. The approach is to run attestation in a collective way, with the goal of reducing computation and communication. Despite these advances, current solutions for attestation are still unsatisfactory because of their complex management and strict assumptions concerning the topology (e.g., being time invariant or maintaining a fixed topology). In this paper, we propose PADS, a secure, efficient, and practical protocol for attesting potentially large networks of smart devices with unstructured or dynamic topologies. PADS builds upon the recent concept of non-interactive attestation, by reducing the collective attestation problem into a minimum consensus one. We compare PADS with a state-of-the art collective attestation protocol and validate it by using realistic simulations that show practicality and efficiency. The results confirm the suitability of PADS for low-end devices, and highly unstructured networks.Comment: Submitted to ESORICS 201

FPGA based remote code integrity verification of programs in distributed embedded systems

The explosive growth of networked embedded systems has made ubiquitous and pervasive computing a reality. However, there are still a number of new challenges to its widespread adoption that include scalability, availability, and, especially, security of software. Among the different challenges in software security, the problem of remote-code integrity verification is still waiting for efficient solutions. This paper proposes the use of reconfigurable computing to build a consistent architecture for generation of attestations (proofs) of code integrity for an executing program as well as to deliver them to the designated verification entity. Remote dynamic update of reconfigurable devices is also exploited to increase the complexity of mounting attacks in a real-word environment. The proposed solution perfectly fits embedded devices that are nowadays commonly equipped with reconfigurable hardware components that are exploited to solve different computational problems

LO-FAT: Low-Overhead Control Flow ATtestation in Hardware

Attacks targeting software on embedded systems are becoming increasingly prevalent. Remote attestation is a mechanism that allows establishing trust in embedded devices. However, existing attestation schemes are either static and cannot detect control-flow attacks, or require instrumentation of software incurring high performance overheads. To overcome these limitations, we present LO-FAT, the first practical hardware-based approach to control-flow attestation. By leveraging existing processor hardware features and commonly-used IP blocks, our approach enables efficient control-flow attestation without requiring software instrumentation. We show that our proof-of-concept implementation based on a RISC-V SoC incurs no processor stalls and requires reasonable area overhead.Comment: Authors' pre-print version to appear in DAC 2017 proceeding