Secure Embedded Sensor Systems with Remote Attestation

With the most populous countries on the planet relying on biometric identity systems (e.g.\ China, India) and a push towards digital identities within the EU (e.g.\ EUID), it is important to consider how and where the data linked to these digital identities is handled. Centralized sets of identifying data lend themselves to abuse, necessitating their decentralized storage. This is exactly what Project Digidow aims to provide: a distributed, scalable biometric authentication system. To offer its services, Digidow relies on a fleet of sensors which users have to present their biometric profiles to. Implicitly trusting that these sensors are trustworthy is potentially dangerous because sensitive data could be passed to malicious actors. This thesis aims to bridge this gap, by enabling the sensors to perform remote attestation. Using this process, they gain the capability of providing evidence to users and their agents, that they are currently in a known state. Based on this, sensor manufacturers can provide reference values for trustworthy sensor states, which users can then use to derive trust from the evidence they received. This thesis shows how attestation can be done using off-the-shelf hardware like a Raspberry Pi, while also highlighting the inherent limitations of such an implementation and how to potentially overcome them. The practical output provides all the necessary code changes and additions to existing Digidow components to run such an attestation in a secure and trustworthy manner.