PADS: Practical Attestation for Highly Dynamic Swarm Topologies
This addresses the challenge of scalable and flexible attestation for IoT networks, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing non-interactive attestation concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of inefficient remote attestation for large IoT networks with dynamic topologies by proposing PADS, a protocol that reduces collective attestation to minimum consensus, achieving practicality and efficiency in simulations for low-end devices.
Remote attestation protocols are widely used to detect device configuration (e.g., software and/or data) compromise in Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. Unfortunately, the performances of such protocols are unsatisfactory when dealing with thousands of smart devices. Recently, researchers are focusing on addressing this limitation. The approach is to run attestation in a collective way, with the goal of reducing computation and communication. Despite these advances, current solutions for attestation are still unsatisfactory because of their complex management and strict assumptions concerning the topology (e.g., being time invariant or maintaining a fixed topology). In this paper, we propose PADS, a secure, efficient, and practical protocol for attesting potentially large networks of smart devices with unstructured or dynamic topologies. PADS builds upon the recent concept of non-interactive attestation, by reducing the collective attestation problem into a minimum consensus one. We compare PADS with a state-of-the art collective attestation protocol and validate it by using realistic simulations that show practicality and efficiency. The results confirm the suitability of PADS for low-end devices, and highly unstructured networks.