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An approach to introducing locality in remote attestation using near field communications

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Abstract

Remote Attestation, as devised by the Trusted Computing Group, is based on a secure hardware component—the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). It allows to reach trust decisions between different network hosts. However, attestation cannot be applied in an important field of application—the identification of physically encountered, public computer platforms. Unfortunately, such computer terminals are especially exposed and the software running on them cannot be assumed unaltered and secure.

Three challenges arise. The cryptographic protocols that actually perform the attestation do not provide for human-intelligible trust status analysis, easily graspable conveyance of results, nor the intuitive identification of the computer platform involved. Therefore, the user needs a small portable device, a token, to interact with local computer platforms. It can perform an attestation protocol, report the result to the user, even if the display the user faces cannot be trusted and may be connected to the platform under scrutiny. In addition, the token must establish that the particular machine faced actually contains the TPM that performs the attestation.

In this paper, we demonstrate an attestation token architecture which is based on a commodity smart phone and which is more efficient and flexible than previous proposals. Furthermore, we introduce an autonomic and low-cost Near Field Communication (NFC) compatible interface to the TPM that provides a direct channel for proof of the TPM’s identity and local proximity to the attestation token.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communications (IAIK), Graz University of Technology, Inffeldgasse 16a, 8010, Graz, Austria

    Ronald Toegl & Michael Hutter

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  1. Ronald Toegl
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  2. Michael Hutter
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Correspondence to Ronald Toegl.

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Toegl, R., Hutter, M. An approach to introducing locality in remote attestation using near field communications. J Supercomput 55, 207–227 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-010-0407-1

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