Remote Attestation as a Service for IoT

Abstract

Remote attestation is a two-party security protocol that aims to detect the presence of malware in a remote untrusted IoT device. In order to perform the attestation, an IoT device typically has to stop the regular operation and perform expensive computations that will consume the battery life of the device. In this paper, we use cloud/fog computing to attest an IoT device in an efficient way. We propose Remote Attestation as a Service (RAaS) which allows even a low-end IoT device to securely offload the attestation process to the cloud. We argue that RAaS allows the clone of the device, securely created in the cloud, to perform the most expensive attestation computations. Our proposed approach could reduce the number of attestation operations running on the real IoT device, saving energy consumption, and reducing the downtime of the usual operation of an IoT device during the execution of remote attestation.