| Title | A Practical Attestation Protocol for Autonomous Embedded Systems |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2019 |
| Authors | Kohnhäuser, Florian, Büscher, Niklas, Katzenbeisser, Stefan |
| Conference Name | 2019 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS P) |
| Keywords | arbitrary device outages, attestation, autonomous embedded systems, autonomous networks, autonomous system, collective attestation, composability, computer networks, connected embedded devices, embedded system, Embedded systems, existing attestation protocols, Human Behavior, Internet of Things, low-end embedded devices, low-end prover devices, low-end verifier devices, Mesh networks, network disruptions, PASTA, performance evaluation, Protocols, pubcrawl, remote attestation, remote device, Resiliency, Robustness, safe operation, Scalability, secure operation, security, security guarantees |
| Abstract | With the recent advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), embedded devices increasingly operate collaboratively in autonomous networks. A key technique to guard the secure and safe operation of connected embedded devices is remote attestation. It allows a third party, the verifier, to ensure the integrity of a remote device, the prover. Unfortunately, existing attestation protocols are impractical when applied in autonomous networks of embedded systems due to their limited scalability, performance, robustness, and security guarantees. In this work, we propose PASTA, a novel attestation protocol that is particularly suited for autonomous embedded systems. PASTA is the first that (i) enables many low-end prover devices to attest their integrity towards many potentially untrustworthy low-end verifier devices, (ii) is fully decentralized, thus, able to withstand network disruptions and arbitrary device outages, and (iii) is in addition to software attacks capable of detecting physical attacks in a much more robust way than any existing protocol. We implemented our protocol, conducted measurements, and simulated large networks. The results show that PASTA is practical on low-end embedded devices, scales to large networks with millions of devices, and improves robustness by multiple orders of magnitude compared with the best existing protocols. |
| DOI | 10.1109/EuroSP.2019.00028 |
| Citation Key | kohnhauser_practical_2019 |
A Practical Attestation Protocol for Autonomous Embedded Systems