Loganathan (Parthi) Parthipan

For many years, trusted computing research has focused on the trustworthiness of single computer platforms. For example, how can I decide whether I can trust my personal computer (A) or another computer (B), who communicates with A? In reality, both A and B are part of a computing network, in which there are many other computers, and these computers’ behaviour affects the trustworthiness of any communication between A and B. Obviously, the target of trusted computing is not only to build trusted devices but also trusted networks. Attestation is a mechanism initially designed to ascertain the trustworthiness of a single device. To check on the trustworthiness of a network, we need a network attestation mechanism. The basis of attestation is a root of trust, and research on building roots of trust for individual devices has been successful. One of the next challenges, the most important one, is to create a root of trust for network attestation. In this paper, we introduce our research on designing such a root of trust. This uses devices’ individual roots of trust and a decentralised ledger together with the techniques of “zero trust but verify”, which means that to start with, any entity in the system is not trusted until its functionality can be verified. Based on the verification results, the entities can establish trust. We aim to use such a root of trust to aggregate the attestation evidence and verification results from multiple devices in a network and to achieve trust in the network.

In the current generation of networks, there has been a strong focus on security and integrity. In sixth-generation (6G) networks trust will also be an important requirement, but how do we build trust in a network? Many researchers have started to pay attention to this, but research in this field is still at an early stage. Taking our lead from the development of trusted computing for single devices we require a root of trust and a mechanism for reliably measuring and reporting on the state of the network. In this paper, we survey existing technologies that we feel can be used to achieve this. We explore trusted computing technologies that enable a single device to be trusted and suggest how they can be adapted to help build a trusted network. For reporting, we need a mechanism to immutably store measurements on the system. We consider that distributed ledger technologies could fulfil this role as they offer immutability, decentralised consensus, and transparency.