Paper Accepted at DATE 2024

Our paper, Demonstrating Post-Quantum Remote Attestation for RISC-V Devices, authored by Maximilian Barger (MSc Computer Security student at VU Amsterdam), Marco Brohet and Francesco Regazzoni, has been accepted as an extended abstract at the 2024 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE).

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has revolutionized many aspects of modern computing. Experience has shown that these devices often have severe security problems and are common targets for malware. One approach to ensure that only trusted software is executed on these devices is Remote Attestation, which allows a verifier to attest the integrity of software running on such a prover device. As malware is typically not trusted, an infected device will fail to generate a valid signature, which allows the verifier to detect the presence of malware on the prover. To achieve its security guarantees, Remote Attestation requires a trust anchor, often found in the form of dedicated hardware on the prover. For IoT and embedded devices such hardware has only recently become largely deployed. Modern Remote Attestation protocols rely on classical asymmetric signatures that are vulnerable to quantum attacks, which are expected to become feasible in the near future. Considering the extensive usage of IoT and embedded systems combined with their long lifetime (in some applications), it is necessary to be able to retrofit these devices to support quantum secure Remote Attestation without incurring a prohibitive overhead. In this paper we present SPRAV, a software-based Remote Attestation system that leverages the Physical Memory Protection (PMP) primitive of RISC-V to achieve its security guarantees and employs quantum- safe cryptographic algorithms to ensure resistance against quan- tum attacks in the future. Our evaluation shows that it is feasible to deploy this solution on RISC-V devices without incurring a prohibitive overhead or the need for additional hardware, paving the way towards quantum-resistant functionalities also in IoT.