Towards Practical Hardware Fingerprinting for Remote Attestation

Abstract

In the realm of Trusted Computing for embedded systems, ensuring the integrity of both firmware and hardware presents a complex challenge. Traditional approaches have focused on detecting firmware and operating system (OS) software manipulations, leaving a gap in the identification of subtle hardware modifications and attacks. This paper extends previous work on hardware fingerprinting for remote attestation by conducting and analyzing comprehensive long-term hardware measurements. Building upon the established methodology, we examine the correlation between environmental parameters and analog-to-digital converter (ADC) values to gain suitable reference values for remote attestation procedures. Our work introduces significant contributions: the implementation of two distinct test setups for enhanced hardware fingerprinting, a rigorous evaluation of these measurements to identify strong correlations, the development of a standardized log format for hardware measurements aimed at adoption by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), and the application to Trusted Platform Module TPM based measured boot and remote attestation. In summary, we integrate hardware manipulation detection with the TPM, and lay the groundwork for a more secure and reliable computing environment in embedded systems.