Type of Publication: Article in Collected Edition

DMA'n'Play: Practical Remote Attestation Based on Direct Memory Access

Author(s):

Surminski, Sebastian; Niesler, Christian; Davi, Lucas; Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza

Title of Anthology:

Proc. of 21st International Conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security (ACNS)

Location(s):

Kyoto, Japan

Publication Date:

2023

Citation:

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Abstract

Remote attestation allows validating the trustworthiness of a remote device. Existing attestation schemes either require hardware changes, trusted computing components, or rely on strict timing constraints. In this paper, we present a novel remote attestation approach, called DMA’n’Play, that tackles these practical limitations by leveraging DMA (direct memory access). Since DMA does not require CPU time, DMA’n’Play even allows attestation of devices with real-time constraints. To prevent the exploitation of side-channels which potentially could determine if the attestation is running, we developed DMA’n’Play To-Go, a small, mobile attestation device that can be plugged into the attested device. We evaluated DMA’n’Play on two real-world devices, namely a syringe pump and a drone. Our evaluation shows that DMA’n’Play adds negligible performance overhead and prevents dataonly attacks, by validating critical data in memory.