A Decentralized PUF-Based Scheme for Remote Attestation

With the continuous growth of edge computing, numerous edge devices collaborate in decentralized groups to provide flexible and reliable services while distributing computational workloads. However, the presence of numerous devices requires the adaptation of existing end-to-end security-procedures designed for resource-constrained edge-nodes. Among them, Remote Attestation allows a remote server to directly evaluate the trustworthiness of a node, by remotely verifying that no-malicious code is being executed on the target. Unfortunately, attesting groups of devices remains an open challenge, as it must minimize message exchanges to reduce network bandwidth consumption while ensuring lightweight computation on both the server and device sides. For these reasons, we propose DHERAP, a PUF-based remote attestation protocol targeted for groups of decentralized edge-nodes. We design DHERAP to reduce message overhead by enabling different nodes to attest local groups of nodes, removing the need for remote communication to a server.