LICAPA: Lightweight collective attestation for physical attacks detection in highly dynamic networks

UAVs or vehicular networks have been extensively used in different domains. Such a system network consists of various heterogeneous and mobile devices operating autonomously and cooperatively to provide flexible services. However, ensuring devices’ runtime integrity has always been critical to such highly dynamic and disruptive networks. Collective attestation is a popular technique in ensuring service integrity on remote devices. However, the physical attacks pose significant threats to the enforcement of the runtime integrity, and the existing detection approaches raise a considerable number of false positives, which impede the robustness of the network. We propose LICAPA, a collective attestation framework for detecting physical attacks with high accuracy. LICAPA can detect a device under physical attack with the timestamps signed by other recently-attested devices. Such a proof-from-others mechanism provides more knowledge about the compromised device for physical attack detection. It reduces the potential false positives compared with the state-of-the-art approaches. LICAPA provides a physical-adversary-tolerant runtime device joining mechanism and a new attestation report aggregation scheme to reduce the storage and communication cost of the device. On the prototype implementation of the trust anchor, we evaluate LICAPA’s computational costs. The simulation results demonstrate LICAPA’s low communication cost and long resistance time against false detection on physical attack. LICAPA reduces the overall swarm attestation cost by over 20% compared with SALAD (Secure and Lightweight Attestation of Highly Dynamic and Disruptive Networks) and PASTA (Practical Attestation Protocol for Autonomous Embedded Systems).