Bloom Filter based Collective Remote Attestation for Dynamic Networks

Abstract

Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) devices are widely used in several application scenarios. Due to their cheap structure, they often do not guarantee high security standard, making them prone to hacker attacks. Remote attestation is widely used to verify the configuration integrity on remote devices. Unfortunately, checking the integrity of each single device is impractical, thus several collective remote attestation protocols have been recently proposed to efficiently run attestations in wide device swarms. However, current solutions still have several limitations in terms of network topology, scalability, and efficiency. This paper presents a new efficient collective remote attestation protocol for highly dynamic networks. Our protocol is implemented according to the self-attestation procedure, where devices iteratively establish a common view of the integrity of the network through a consensus mechanism. Differently from previous protocols, we leverage on Bloom filters, which permits to drastically reduce the message size for communication and to be more flexible with mobile nodes that can also join or leave the swarm. We evaluate our proposal through several simulations and experiments, showing that it outperforms the state of the art.