A Verified Achitecture for Trustworthy Remote Attestation

Abstract

Remote attestation is a process where one digital system gathers and provides evidence of its state and identity to an external system. For this process to be successful, the external system must find the evidence convincingly trustworthy within that context. Remote attestation is difficult to make trustworthy due to the external system’s limited access to the attestation target. In contrast to local attestation, the appraising system is unable to directly observe and oversee the attestation target. In this work, we present a system architecture design and prototype implementation that we claim enables trustworthy remote attestation. Furthermore, we formally model the system within a temporal logic embedded in the Coq theorem prover and present key theorems that strengthen this trust argument.