Remote Attestation on Legacy Operating Systems With Trusted Platform Modules

Abstract

A lot of progress has been made to secure network communication, e.g., through the use of cryptographic algorithms. However, this offers only a partial solution as long as the communicating end points still suffer from security problems. A number of applications require remote verification of software executing on an untrusted platform. Trusted computing solutions propose to solve this problem through software and hardware changes, typically a secure operating system and the addition of a secure coprocessor respectively. On the other hand, timed execution of code checksum calculations aims for a solution on legacy platforms, but can not provide strong security assurance. We present a mixed solution by using the trusted computing hardware, namely the time stamping functionality of the trusted platform module, in combination with a timing based remote code integrity verification mechanism. In this way, we do not require a secure operating system, but at the same time the overall security of the timed execution scheme can be improved.

User Centric Security Model for Tamper-Resistant Devices

“…Other mechanisms that use trusted hardware are proposed by Schellekens et al [153] and PUF-based protocols [123,135,154].…”

SARA: Sandwiched attestation through remote agents for cluster-based wireless sensor networks

“…In contrast to the existing schemes, 7,8 in this study, the builtin independent system clock inside the remote agent is employed to locally measure T Elp , which is independent of the wireless transmission delay. Both schemes 11,20 have demonstrated the effectiveness of local elapsed time measurement and therefore a remote attestation scheme employing such a technique is particularly suitable for a multihop communication between the verifier and the prover. Furthermore, an expected T Elp ensures that the checksum computation is executed under an uninterrupted environment.…”

“…a TPM), which can be a tamper-resistant storage or an isolated environment. Both TPM-based schemes 11,12 have been proposed for attesting the system integrity of a primary platform. Defrawy et al 28 proposed SMART relying on a dedicated circuit used for providing access control to a secret key.…”

“…However, such schemes are suitable only for one-hop communication between the verifier and the prover. Hardware-based schemes [10][11][12] rely on a trusted platform module (TPM) complying with the ISO/IEC 11889 standard. 13 TPM is a high-level hardware security module (HSM) consisting of several cryptographic components, such as asymmetric key cryptosystem, pseudorandom number generator, and one-way hash function.…”

Context-Dependent Authentication and Access Control

“…Attestation schemes [37,39] and approaches to secure roaming [25] can be used to ensure that a remote (untrusted) device guarantees certain behavior using trusted hardware. Trusted hardware can also be used to store cryptographic keys or bind protected data to a machine [42,2,18,22,16,21].…”