On the TOCTOU Problem in Remote Attestation

Nunes, Ivan De Oliveira; Jakkamsetti, Sashidhar; Rattanavipanon, Norrathep; Tsudik, Gene

doi:10.48550/arxiv.2005.03873

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Moreover, the survey of Steiner et al [15] presents this logical flaw as an important issue in the context of WSN attestation. Finally, De Oliveira Nunes et al [136] present RATA, an extension of their project VRASED [98] which protects the later against TOCTOU.…”

Section: ) Known Attacksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Firmware Integrity Protection: A Survey

Marchand,

Imine,

Ouarnoughi

et al. 2023

IEEE Access

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Over the last years, firmware integrity protection has significantly been addressed in various contexts such as internet of things, vehicles, wireless sensor networks and other systems. However, due to variety of studied systems, the proposed approaches often make divergent and sometimes even conflicting security assumptions. In this regard, we propose in this article a complete survey of the most relevant approaches addressing the firmware integrity protection regardless the considered system or field of application. We first organize the approaches in three main categories, depending on the protection type: 1. secure update, 2. attestation, and 3. secure boot. We then propose two new taxonomies, the first one concerns secure update mechanisms and the second one considers secure boot. Moreover, we extend the scope of an existing taxonomy for attestation mechanisms by studying new approaches and discussing limitations. Finally, we identify open research challenges and then give suggestions and guidelines on how to address them.

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Section: ) Known Attacksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Firmware Integrity Protection: A Survey

Marchand,

Imine,

Ouarnoughi

et al. 2023

IEEE Access

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“…TOCTOU Attacks on Attestation. A discussion of the TOCTOU problem in the context of on-request hybrid attestation for constrained devices is provided in [46]. As a solution, the authors propose a method that uses secure logging of the time of memory modification.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous work in the area of TOCTOU attacks on attestation has either considered high-end TPM-based Linux devices [21] or discuss TOCTOU countermeasures [46]. To the best of our knowledge we present the first attack on the standardized DICE attestation architecture for deeply embedded systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A TOCTOU Attack on DICE Attestation

Hristozov,

Wettermann,

Huber

2022

Preprint

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A major security challenge for modern Internet of Things (IoT) deployments is to ensure that the devices run legitimate firmware free from malware. This challenge can be addressed through a security primitive called attestation which allows a remote backend to verify the firmware integrity of the devices it manages. In order to accelerate broad attestation adoption in the IoT domain the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has introduced the Device Identifier Composition Engine (DICE) series of specifications. DICE is a hardwaresoftware architecture for constrained, e.g., microcontroller-based IoT devices where the firmware is divided into successively executed layers.In this paper, we demonstrate a remote Time-Of-Check Time-Of-Use (TOCTOU) attack on DICE-based attestation. We demonstrate that it is possible to install persistent malware in the flash memory of a constrained microcontroller that cannot be detected through DICE-based attestation. The main idea of our attack is to install malware during runtime of application logic in the top firmware layer. The malware reads the valid attestation key and stores it on the device's flash memory. After reboot, the malware uses the previously stored key for all subsequent attestations to the backend. We conduct the installation of malware and copying of the key through Return-Oriented Programming (ROP). As a platform for our demonstration we use the Cortex-M-based nRF52840 microcontroller. We provide a discussion of several possible countermeasures which can mitigate the shortcomings of the DICE specifications. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Embedded systems security.

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On the TOCTOU Problem in Remote Attestation

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Firmware Integrity Protection: A Survey

Firmware Integrity Protection: A Survey

A TOCTOU Attack on DICE Attestation

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