Mastersthesis,
Aggregatable Remote Attestation for IoT
University of Würzburg, Bachelor Thesis, (December 2020)
Abstract
With the recent spike of Internet of Things (IoT) and "smart" devices, there has also been an increase in the amount of attacks on IoT networks. Wide-reaching attacks such as the one from the Mirai botnet in 2016 show how crucial it is to know that a device can be trusted before initiating communication. Remote Attestation (RA) is a proven method for asserting that a device is in a benign state. It is a challenge-response process between two parties, where the first checks the trustworthiness of the second. However, it is characterizable with low scalability a critical issue in the IoT sector. In our work, we model a new RA protocol, called Aggregatable Remote Attestation, which would allow a device to process multiple RA challenges simultaneously. We base it on the already existing SIMPLE architecture and implement it as a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) by modifying the code of the Security MicroVisor the core component of SIMPLE. We evaluate our work in terms of security and performance and show that it greatly outperforms the underlying SIMPLE. We discuss the relevance of our design in relation to the IoT sphere and denote a small set of potential topics for future work and research.
