Lightweight Swarm Attestation: A Tale of Two LISA-s

Abstract

In the last decade, Remote Attestation (RA) emerged as a distinct security service for detecting attacks on embedded devices, cyber-physical systems (CPS) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. RA involves verification of current internal state of an untrusted remote hardware platform (prover) by a trusted entity (verifier). RA can help the latter establish a static or dynamic root of trust in the prover and can also be used to construct other security services, such as software updates and secure deletion. Various RA techniques with different assumptions, security features and complexities, have been proposed for the single-prover scenario. However, the advent of IoT brought about the paradigm of many interconnected devices, thus triggering the need for efficient collective attestation of a (possibly mobile) group or swarm of provers. Though recent work has yielded some initial concepts for swarm attestation, several key issues remain unaddressed, and practical realizations have not been explored. This paper's main goal is to advance swarm attestation by bringing it closer to reality. To this end, it makes two contributions: (1) a new metric, called QoSA: Quality of Swarm Attestation, that captures the information offered by a swarm attestation technique; this allows comparing efficacy of multiple protocols, and (2) two practical attestation protocols -- called LISAa and LISAs -- for mobile swarms, with different QoSA features and communication and computation complexities. Security of proposed protocols is analyzed and their performance is assessed based on experiments with prototype implementations.