ScaRR: Scalable Runtime Remote Attestation for Complex Systems

The introduction of remote attestation (RA) schemes has allowed academia and industry to enhance the security of their systems. The commercial products currently available enable only the validation of static properties, such as applications fingerprint, and do not handle runtime properties, such as control-flow correctness. This limitation pushed researchers towards the identification of new approaches, called runtime RA. However, those mainly work on embedded devices, which share very few common features with complex systems, such as virtual machines in a cloud. A naive deployment of runtime RA schemes for embedded devices on complex systems faces scalability problems, such as the representation of complex control-flows or slow verification phase. In this work, we present ScaRR: the first Scalable Runtime Remote attestation schema for complex systems. Thanks to its novel control-flow model, ScaRR enables the deployment of runtime RA on any application regardless of its complexity, by also achieving good performance. We implemented ScaRR and tested it on the benchmark suite SPEC CPU 2017. We show that ScaRR can validate on average 2M control-flow events per second, definitely outperforming existing solutions.Comment: 14 page

Rational physical agent reasoning beyond logic

The paper addresses the problem of defining a theoretical physical agent framework that satisfies practical requirements of programmability by non-programmer engineers and at the same time permitting fast realtime operation of agents on digital computer networks. The objective of the new framework is to enable the satisfaction of performance requirements on autonomous vehicles and robots in space exploration, deep underwater exploration, defense reconnaissance, automated manufacturing and household automation

A Low-Overhead Script Language for Tiny Networked Embedded Systems

With sensor networks starting to get mainstream acceptance, programmability is of increasing importance. Customers and field engineers will need to reprogram existing deployments and software developers will need to test and debug software in network testbeds. Script languages, which are a popular mechanism for reprogramming in general-purpose computing, have not been considered for wireless sensor networks because of the perceived overhead of interpreting a script language on tiny sensor nodes. In this paper we show that a structured script language is both feasible and efficient for programming tiny sensor nodes. We present a structured script language, SCript, and develop an interpreter for the language. To reduce program distribution energy the SCript interpreter stores a tokenized representation of the scripts which is distributed through the wireless network. The ROM and RAM footprint of the interpreter is similar to that of existing virtual machines for sensor networks. We show that the interpretation overhead of our language is on par with that of existing virtual machines. Thus script languages, previously considered as too expensive for tiny sensor nodes, are a viable alternative to virtual machines