AuRA: Remote Attestation over EDHOC for Constrained Internet-of-Things Use Cases
Yuxuan Song, Geovane Fedrecheski, Mališa Vučinić, Thomas Watteyne
IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC), Bologna, Italy, 2-5 July 2025
Abstract: Remote Attestation (RA) is a security process that
verifies the integrity and trustworthiness of a remote device’s
software and hardware. While RA for high-end devices is
well-developed, RA in constrained IoT environments remains
incomplete. Existing embedded RA mechanisms focus on local
evidence generation and verification, but lack a complete process
that includes a secure attestation channel. This paper introduces
AuRA, a lightweight RA solution that builds upon the newly
standardized Ephemeral Diffie-Hellman over COSE (EDHOC)
protocol. AuRA specifies how to transport existing attestation
mechanisms in parallel with network authentication. We evaluate
AuRA on the nRF5340 microcontroller running at 64 MHz. This
implementation has a memory footprint of 6,665 B of RAM and
17,163 B of flash. The device completes Remote Attestation by
exchanging three EDHOC messages with a verifier entity, of
sizes 42 B, 59 B and 223 B. This allows the device to prove that
it is running the right hardware and software in only 5.51 s,
consuming as little as 88 mC of charge.