XEBRA: XEn Based Remote Attestation

Modern computing environments are increasingly getting distributed with one machine executing programs on the other remotely. Often, multiple machines work together to complete a task. Its important for collaborating machines to trust each other in order to perform properly. Such scenarios have brought up a key security issue of trustably and securely executing critical code on remote machines. We present a purely software based remote attestation technique XEBRA(XEn Based Remote Attestation) that guarantees the execution of correct code on a remote host, termed as remote attestation. XEBRA can be used to establish dynamic root of trust in a remote computing device using virtualization. We also show our approach to be feasible on embedded platforms by implementing it on an Intel Galileo board.