LIRA-V: Lightweight Remote Attestation for Constrained RISC-V Devices

TL;DR

LIRA-V is a lightweight remote attestation system designed for constrained RISC-V devices, enabling secure communication and trust establishment in IoT and cyber-physical systems.

Contribution

This paper introduces the first remote attestation mechanism tailored for constrained RISC-V devices, utilizing RISC-V PMP and read-only memory for security.

Findings

Successful implementation on off-the-shelf RISC-V microcontroller

Demonstrated low overhead suitable for constrained devices

Enables trusted communication between devices

Abstract

This paper presents LIRA-V, a lightweight system for performing remote attestation between constrained devices using the RISC-V architecture. We propose using read-only memory and the RISC-V Physical Memory Protection (PMP) primitive to build a trust anchor for remote attestation and secure channel creation. Moreover, we show how LIRA-V can be used for trusted communication between two devices using mutual attestation. We present the design, implementation and evaluation of LIRA-V using an off-the-shelf RISC-V microcontroller and present performance results to demonstrate its suitability. To our knowledge, we present the first remote attestation mechanism suitable for constrained RISC-V devices, with applications to cyber-physical systems and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.