SANA: Secure and scalable aggregate network attestation

Abstract

Large numbers of smart connected devices, also named as the Internet of Things (IoT), are permeating our environments (homes, factories, cars, and also our body-with wearable devices) to collect data and act on the insight derived. Ensuring software integrity (including OS, apps, and configurations) on such smart devices is then essential to guarantee both privacy and safety. A key mechanism to protect the software integrity of these devices is remote attestation: A process that allows a remote verifier to validate the integrity of the software of a device. This process usually makes use of a signed hash value of the actual device's software, generated by dedicated hardware. While individual device attestation is a well-established technique, to date integrity verification of a very large number of devices remains an open problem, due to scalability issues. In this paper, we present SANA, the first secure and scalable protocol for efficient attestation of large sets of devices that works under realistic assumptions. SANA relies on a novel signature scheme to allow anyone to publicly verify a collective attestation in constant time and space, for virtually an unlimited number of devices. We substantially improve existing swarm attestation schemes [5] by supporting a realistic trust model where: (1) only the targeted devices are required to implement attestation; (2) compromising any device does not harm others; and (3) all aggregators can be untrusted. We implemented SANA and demonstrated its efficiency on tiny sensor devices. Furthermore, we simulated SANA at large scale, to assess its scalability. Our results show that SANA can provide efficient attestation of networks of 1, 000, 000 devices, in only 2.5 seconds.