Trust or Bust: Reinforcing Trust-Aware Path Establishment with Implicit Attestation Capabilities

With the rapid expansion of computational resources from the core cloud towards the far-edge, we face new security and trust assurance challenges. To provide stronger guarantees on the resources serving sensitive traffic workloads, it is necessary to provide mechanisms to verify both software and hardware integrity across all elements comprising the compute continuum. Towards this direction, remote attestation is a promising mechanism that allows a third party to ensure a remote entity’s integrity. However, many of the existing attestation solutions have strong assumptions on the trustworthiness of the verifying entity, thus not allowing for privacy-preserving integrity correctness. Furthermore, they suffer from scalability and efficiency issues even when targeting static properties. This paper presents a lightweight runtime configuration integrity verification that enables implicit attestation without disclosing any information of the configuration of a proving device. Based on the presented findings, our implementation attests to the efficiency of the proposed solution.