Model-based behavioral attestation

Abstract

Remote attestation is an important characteristic of trusted computing technology which provides reliable evidence that a trusted environment actually exists. Existing approaches for the realization of remote attestation measure the trustworthiness of a target platform from its binaries, configurations, properties or security policies. All these approaches are low-level attestation techniques only, and none of them define what a trusted behavior actually is and how to specify it. In this paper, we present a novel approach where the trustworthiness of a platform is associated with the behavior of a policy model. In our approach, the behavior of a policy model is attested rather than a software or hardware platform. Thus, the attestation feature is not tied to a specific software or hardware platform, or to a particular remote attestation technique, or to an individual type of security policy. We select usage control (UCON) as our target policy model as it is a comprehensive and flexible model. We propose a framework to identify, specify, and attest different behaviors of UCON.