Remote attestation

Remote attestation is a process in which a device produces evidence about its own state, signed with keys it protects, so that a remote party can decide whether to consider it trustworthy ^{1 2}.

The IETF RATS architecture names three roles:

• Attester. It produces evidence: claims that may include configuration data, measurements and telemetry, typically signed with its key material ¹.
• Verifier. It appraises the evidence against reference values and an appraisal policy, and produces attestation results ¹.
• Relying party. It uses the results to decide whether to treat the attester as trustworthy ¹.

In the Trusted Computing Group's model, a root of trust for reporting gives attested platform characteristics their authenticity and non-repudiation ³. A nonce sent by the appraising party and signed into the evidence shows that the evidence is fresh rather than replayed ¹. Attestation is not isolation: a trusted execution environment protects a workload, while attestation lets a remote party check what a genuine TEE loaded, and confidential computing requires both ⁴. In AI verification, attestation underlies TEE remote attestation for AI workloads and chip location verification; for location, Scher and Thiergart note that the chip's private key must not be extractable, or other chips could impersonate it ⁵.