Abstract
Given the growing number and increasingly criminally motivated attacks on computing platforms, the ability to assert the integrity of platform becomes indispensable. The trusted computing community has come up with various remote attestation protocols that allow to assert the integrity of a remote platform over a network.
A related problem is that of ad hoc attestation, where a user walks up to a computing platform and wants to find out whether that platform in front of her is in a trustworthy state or not. ad hoc attestation is considered to be an open problem, and some very recent publications have outlined a number of open challenges in this field. Major challenges are (i) the security against platform in the middle attacks (ii) viable choice of the device used to perform attestation, and (iii) the manageability of integrity measurements on that device.
In this paper we describe a concrete implementation of an ad hoc attestation system that resolves these challenges. Most importantly, our system offers a novel and very intuitive user experience. In fact, from a user perspective, ad hoc attestation using our solution roughly consists of initiating the process on the target platform and then holding a security token to the screen of the target platform. The outcome of the ad hoc attestation (i.e., whether the platform is trustworthy or not) is then shown on the token’s display. This usage paradigm, which we refer to as demonstrative ad hoc attestation, is based on a novel security token technology, which we have used. We believe that our system has the potential to be evolved into a system for real world usage.
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Bangerter, E., Djackov, M., Sadeghi, AR. (2008). A Demonstrative Ad Hoc Attestation System. In: Wu, TC., Lei, CL., Rijmen, V., Lee, DT. (eds) Information Security. ISC 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5222. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85886-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85886-7_2
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