Abstract
Remote attestation is one of the key functionalities provided by trusted platforms. Most current attestation approaches are based on cryptographic hash functions, which are appropriate to attest to relatively stable objects such as executables. However, they can not effectively deal with software configurations that could have many (or even infinite) trusted variants and could also be modified at run-time. This paper proposes SAConf, a novel semantic attestation approach to attesting to software configurations. SAConf uses a list of constraints to represent the challenger’s trust policies, and verifies configurations based on semantic checks against the constraints, according to the semantic meanings of configurations rather than their hashes. An on-request measurement strategy is also added as a complement to the on-load strategy in order to capture potential modifications to configurations during execution. We implemented a prototype of SAConf and evaluations show that it could reduce the storage overhead from exponential to linear compared to hash-based approaches.
This research is supported by the National High Technology 863 Program of China under Grant No. 2007AA01Z462 and 2008AA01Z133, the National Basic Research Program of China (973) under Grant No. 2009CB320703, and the Science Fund for Creative Research Groups of China under Grant No. 60821003.
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Wang, H., Guo, Y., Chen, X. (2009). SAConf: Semantic Attestation of Software Configurations. In: González Nieto, J., Reif, W., Wang, G., Indulska, J. (eds) Autonomic and Trusted Computing. ATC 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5586. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02704-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02704-8_10
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