SAFEHIVE: Secure Attestation Framework for Embedded and Heterogeneous IoT Devices in Variable Environments

Nowadays smart contexts (such as smart cities/homes, or Industry 4.0) are rapidly gaining popularity. These new paradigms are enabled by the adoption of smart devices, that allow several programmatically driven actions. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the network built by connecting these smart devices. A critical aspect of these devices is their limited hardware support for security functions. This makes protecting IoT devices very challenging, although very important because they implement critical functions, as in Cyber Physical Systems. In this case, the protection of these systems is of paramount importance because their compromise could cause not only digital but also physical damage. Remote Attestation (RA) is a security process that permits a trusted party to remotely verify devices integrity but this becomes challenging for IoT devices due to their hardware constraints. Swarm Attestation (SA) is a generalization of RA to reduce its overhead for IoT environments. In this way, it becomes possible to attest large IoT networks. This paper introduces SAFEHIVE, a new schema for SA to maximize dynamic swarm configuration and management. This schema permits to manage heterogeneous devices in a dynamic scenario, even in the case of great variability.