ESDRA: An Efficient and Secure Distributed Remote Attestation Scheme for IoT Swarms

An Internet of Things (IoT) system generally contains thousands of heterogeneous devices which often operate in swarms—large, dynamic, and self-organizing networks. Remote attestation is an important cornerstone for the security of these IoT swarms, as it ensures the software integrity of swarm devices and protects them from attacks. However, current attestation schemes suffer from single point of failure verifier. In this paper, we propose an Efficient and Secure Distributed Remote Attestation (ESDRA) scheme for IoT swarms. We present the first many-to-one attestation scheme for device swarms, which reduces the possibility of single point of failure verifier. Moreover, we utilize distributed attestation to verify the integrity of each node and apply accusation mechanism to report the invaded nodes, which makes ESDRA much easier to feedback the certain compromised nodes and reduces the run-time of attestation. We analyze the security of ESDRA and do some simulation experiments to show its practicality and efficiency. Especially, ESDRA can significantly reduce the attestation time and has a better performance in the energy consumption comparing with list-based attestation schemes.