Permutation-Based Firmware Remote Attestation for Internet-of-Things Edge-Based Network
Zainab AlJabri, Jemal Abawajy · IEEE Systems Journal · 2025
Firmware security in edge-enabled IoT devices is crucial, but existing methods struggle to balance strong protection with realistic hardware trust assumptions, device privacy, nontraceability, and resilience against attacks. This article addresses these challenges by introducing a novel permutation-based firmware attestation mechanism. Our method leverages edge servers as verifiers, low-cost memory, randomized permutations, and avalanche criteria for optimized security and efficiency. Rigorous formal and informal security analysis, coupled with performance evaluation, demonstrates superior performance against various attacks, achieving over 90% detection probability and effectively mitigating both remote and mobile software attacks. These results demonstrate the significant potential of our approach for enhancing firmware security in edge-enabled IoT devices.