Resisting Compromise in Remote Swarm Attestation: Dependable and Secure Key Computation for Prover and Verifier

The Internet of Things (IoT) includes a multitude of heterogeneous devices that operate on a large-scale, dynamic, and self-organizing swarm, making it an interesting target for attackers. Swarm attestation is a means to satisfy the security requirement in which a prover entity attempts to demonstrate its honesty to a verifier in the swarm. To date, various models have been proposed for swarm attestation in which public key infrastructure is used for authentication between different devices. However, public key infrastructure has some disadvantages, such as the problem of expired certification, which adds additional overhead to the system. Most previous works, have not explored key agreement and authentication subjects for swarm attestation. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a high speed and low-cost method for authentication and key agreement in swarm attestation. We also conduct a security evaluation of the proposed security protocol, including the ProVerif as a verification tool and also investigate the resistance of the proposed scheme against various well-known attacks. Informal security analysis shows that the proposed protocol is secure. The computational costs are estimated and evaluated through implementation on the NanoPi Fire3 platform. Our results indicate that the cost of our protocol is reasonable and it is suitable for swarm attestation.