Remote Platform Attestation

One of the key mechanisms for trust establishment among different platforms is remote attestation, which allows a platform to vouch for its trust related characteristics to a remote challenger. In this chapter, the authors propose a new conceptual model for remote attestation consisting of four basic ingredients: root of trust, attestation objective, object measurement, and attestation process. With this model, they present a systematic study on the remote attestation, including the methodologies applied for implementing the four elements and the principles for designing an attestation scheme. The authors also examine existing remote attestation schemes in the literature by grouping them into two main types: integrity attestation and quality attestation. They discuss both the strength and the limitations of each type of scheme and explain how they can be applied in trust management in distributed environment.