Towards Efficient Control-Flow Attestation with Software-Assisted Multi-level Execution Tracing
Dimitrios Papamartzivanos, Sofia Anna Menesidou, Panagiotis Gouvas, Thanassis Giannetsos · 2021
In the face of an increasing attack landscape, it is necessary to cater for efficient mechanisms to verify software and device integrity for detecting run-time modifications in next-generation systems-of-systems. In this context, remote attestation is a promising defense mechanism that allows a third party, the verifier, to ensure a remote device’s configuration integrity and behavioural execution correctness. However, most of the existing families of attestation solutions suffer from the lack of software-based mechanisms for the efficient extraction of rigid control-flow information. This limits their applicability to only those cyber-physical systems equipped with additional hardware support. This paper proposes a multi-level execution tracing framework capitalizing on recent software features, namely the extended Berkeley Packet Filter and Intel Processor Trace technologies, that can efficiently capture the entire platform configuration and control-flow stacks, thus, enabling wide attestation coverage capabilities that can be applied on both resource-constrained devices and cloud services. Our goal is to enhance run-time software integrity and trustworthiness with a scalable tracing solution eliminating the need for federated infrastructure trust.