Lecture
From unauthenticated netboot to CRA-ready industrial gateways: measured boot and remote attestation on bare-metal RISC-V
- at -
- Hall C5C5.100
- Language: English
- Type: Lecture
Lecture description
"Cloud-enabled industrial gateways bridging Modbus field equipment to HTTPS/MQTT backends over VPN are directly in scope of the most demanding requirements made by the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA): deployed unattended in accessible locations, holding the VPN and cloud credentials that make them a pivot into both OT and cloud networks, and re-imaged over the network. Yet the network-boot tooling this lifecycle relies on executes unauthenticated images by design, in direct conflict with the CRA's software-integrity and secure-update requirements. Even signed images cannot answer the question an unattended fleet poses: how does an operator know, remotely and continuously, that a deployed gateway runs the software that was shipped?
This session demonstrates an end-to-end, fully open-source answer on RISC-V. Building on an already-released bare-metal programming framework and network-boot framework, we construct a complete trust chain: a minimal, PMP-protected firmware layer as the trusted base; authenticated network boot with signature verification and anti-rollback, doubling as the CRA-mandated secure update path; DICE-style measured boot providing device identity without requiring a TPM; and RATS-based remote attestation that gates release of VPN and MQTT credentials on proven platform state. A tampered device cannot even join the network. Attestation reference values are derived from reproducible builds of the boot chain, tying platform verification to the SBOM and supply-chain transparency the CRA expects of manufacturers and integrators. This technical session distills lessons learned building and releasing these frameworks, from the pitfalls of key derivation without a hardware root of trust to what breaks when netboot signing is integrated in real-world provisioning workflows. The session concludes with a scripted QEMU demonstration that shows (i) a tampered image rejected at boot-time, and (ii) a verified gateway completing attestation, receiving its credentials, and publishing Modbus telemetry to an MQTT broker. This demonstration provides a practical mapping from each mechanism in an open-source stack to the CRA obligations it addresses."
This session demonstrates an end-to-end, fully open-source answer on RISC-V. Building on an already-released bare-metal programming framework and network-boot framework, we construct a complete trust chain: a minimal, PMP-protected firmware layer as the trusted base; authenticated network boot with signature verification and anti-rollback, doubling as the CRA-mandated secure update path; DICE-style measured boot providing device identity without requiring a TPM; and RATS-based remote attestation that gates release of VPN and MQTT credentials on proven platform state. A tampered device cannot even join the network. Attestation reference values are derived from reproducible builds of the boot chain, tying platform verification to the SBOM and supply-chain transparency the CRA expects of manufacturers and integrators. This technical session distills lessons learned building and releasing these frameworks, from the pitfalls of key derivation without a hardware root of trust to what breaks when netboot signing is integrated in real-world provisioning workflows. The session concludes with a scripted QEMU demonstration that shows (i) a tampered image rejected at boot-time, and (ii) a verified gateway completing attestation, receiving its credentials, and publishing Modbus telemetry to an MQTT broker. This demonstration provides a practical mapping from each mechanism in an open-source stack to the CRA obligations it addresses."
