AAoT: Lightweight attestation and authentication of low-resource things in IoT and CPS

Wei Feng, Yu Qin, Shijun Zhao, Dengguo Feng

Abstract: With the rise of Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), the need for smart embedded devices is rapidly increasing, and so does the security and privacy risk. This paper focuses on enabling both remote attestation and authentication of current commodity low-resource embedded devices to enhance security in the IoT and CPS contexts. We demonstrate a detailed design and prototype implementation of AAoT, a lightweight and practical mechanism for Attestation and Authentication of Things, that can provide software integrity, mutual authentication and tamper-proof feature for smart embedded devices. AAoT is based on physical unclonable functions (PUFs), random memory filling and software attestation without requiring any changes in existing micro-controller units (MCUs). We show how to obtain efficient implementations and optimizations for each of the building blocks of AAoT, including a PUF-based memory filling, a checksum function with block-based traversal, a pseudorandom function, a reverse fuzzy extractor and a random number generator. The prototype is implemented on a low-end MCU platform (TI MSP430) by using onboard SRAM, registers and Flash resources.