Veto: Prohibit Outdated Edge System Software from Booting

Abstract

Edge computing emerges as a trend, forming a link between the Internet of Things and cloud-based services.

Large-scale edge deployments are already in place today in the context of communication network providers

that offload more and more tasks to the edge to ensure high flexibility and low latencies. By relying on remote

attestation and disk encryption techniques, we design a novel system architecture that protects confidential

data on edge nodes in the case of device theft. Recent vulnerabilities like Ripple20 and Amnesia:33 show the

consequences and costs of critical security bugs stemming from outdated system software. Thus, we design

our system in a way that a node can derive its decryption key if and only if a trusted remote party (e.g., a

network operator) can verify that it is running the latest software. This is a security feature that prevalent

implementations like Linux’s dm-crypt lack. To secure the early-boot communication, we rely on a trusted

execution environment, hardware offloading, and Rust device drivers. We prototype our system on two recent

ARMv8 devices and show that the performance overhead (≈ 2%) and the boot delay (1s) are low. Thus, we

believe that our concept is a meaningful step towards more secure future edge devices.

Mehr zum Titel