Secure Attestation Framework for Intelligent Transportation Systems - Advancing Swarm Attestation Through the Application of Homomorphic Hashing

Abstract

Internet of Thing (IoT) systems, and in particular intelligent transportation systems, are becoming ever increasingly large and complex. Simultaneously, such systems increasingly coming under attack from malicious parties. To aid in monitoring, and ensuring, the security of such system, one prominent solution is remote attestation (RA) - a process by which trusted entities can determine, and attest, the integrity of un-trusted devices. Whilst contemporary research has lead to the creation of numerous RA schemes, each have their own shortcomings. To address these shortcomings, this thesis proposes a new attestation scheme - FLASH: Fast Lightweight Attestation using Scalable Homomorphic Hashing. As the name suggests, this lightweight attestation scheme utilizes homomorphic hashing to aid in the aggregation of attestation results, reducing computational costs, and enabling efficient scaling across large systems. FLASH is comprised of three separate algorithms, namely two separate on-demand algorithms, and one self-attestation algorithm, all built using a common homomorphic hashing library. To verify the performance and usability of FLASH, proof of concept implementations of the on-demand algorithms have been developed and tested using real-world hardware, with the timing results then subsequently being applied to large-scale self-attestation simulations. Furthermore, result analysis of FLASH testing allowed for the evaluation of both worst-case behavior for both the PoC and simulation, as well as the creation of performance estimates in large scale networks. Together, these findings confirm that FLASH achieves its design goal of being fast, lightweight, and scalable, providing an efficient attestation framework suitable for large-scale IoT and intelligent transportation systems.