GAROTA: Generalized Active Root-Of-Trust Architecture (for Tiny Embedded Devices)
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Presented at USENIX Security 2022 by
Embedded (aka smart or IoT) devices are increasingly popular and becoming ubiquitous. Unsurprisingly, they are also attractive attack targets for exploits and malware. Low-end embedded devices, designed with strict cost, size, and energy limitations, are especially challenging to secure, given their lack of resources to implement sophisticated security services, available on higher-end computing devices. To this end, several tiny Roots-of-Trust (RoTs) were proposed to enable services, such as remote verification of device's software state and run-time integrity. Such RoTs operate reactively: they can prove whether a desired action (e.g., software update or program execution) was performed on a specific device. However, they can not guarantee that a desired action will be performed, since malware controlling the device can trivially block access to the RoT by ignoring/discarding received commands and other trigger events. This is an important problem because it allows malware to effectively "brick" or incapacitate a potentially huge number of (possibly mission-critical) devices.