Paper 2013/083

A Security Framework for Analysis and Design of Software Attestation

Frederik Armknecht and Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi and Steffen Schulz and Christian Wachsmann

Abstract

Software attestation has become a popular and challenging research topic at many established security conferences with an expected strong impact in practice. It aims at verifying the software integrity of (typically) resource-constrained embedded devices. However, for practical reasons, software attestation cannot rely on stored cryptographic secrets or dedicated trusted hardware. Instead, it exploits side-channel information, such as the time that the underlying device needs for a specific computation. As traditional cryptographic solutions and arguments are not applicable, novel approaches for the design and analysis are necessary. This is certainly one of the main reasons why the security goals, properties and underlying assumptions of existing software attestation schemes have been only vaguely discussed so far, limiting the confidence in their security claims. Thus, putting software attestation on a solid ground and having a founded approach for designing secure software attestation schemes is still an important open problem. We provide the first steps towards closing this gap. Our first contribution is a security framework that formally captures security goals, attacker models, and various system and design parameters. Moreover, we present a generic software attestation scheme that covers most existing schemes in the literature. Finally, we analyze its security within our framework, yielding sufficient conditions for provably secure software attestation schemes. We expect that such a consolidating work allows for a meaningful security analysis of existing schemes and supports the design of arguably secure software attestation schemes and will inspire new research in this area.

Note: Added more detailed explanations and background information.