A Minimalist Approach to Remote Attestation Gene Tsudik part 2 Technion lecture

Prof. Gene Tsudik of University of California Irvine at Technion
TCE Summer School 2013
A Minimalist Approach to Remote Attestation
Embedded computing devices increasingly permeate many aspects of modern life: from medical to automotive, from building and factory automation to weapons, from critical infrastructures to home entertainment. Despite their specialized nature as well as limited resources and connectivity, these devices are now becoming an increasingly popular and attractive target for attacks, especially, malware infections. A number of research proposals have been made to detect and/or mitigate such attacks. They vary greatly in terms of application generality and underlying assumptions. However, one common theme is the need for Remote Attestation, a distinct security service that allows a trusted party (verifier) to check the internal state of a remote untrusted embedded device (prover).
In this talk we will provide a systematic treatment of Remote Attestation, starting with a precise definition of the desired service and proceeding to its systematic deconstruction into necessary and suffi cient properties. These properties are, in turn, mapped into a minimal collection of hardware and software components that results in secure Remote Attestation. One distinguishing feature of this line of research is the need to prove (or, at least argue) architectural minimality; this is rarely encountered in security research.