Remote attestation
Remote attestation is a process in which a device produces evidence about its own state, usually signed, so that a remote party can decide whether to consider it trustworthy 1 2.
The core roles in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Remote Attestation Procedures (RATS) architecture are:
- 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 glossary, 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 distinct from isolation. A trusted execution environment protects a workload, while attestation lets a remote party check what a genuine TEE loaded 4. The Confidential Computing Consortium defines confidential computing as requiring both 4. In AI verification, attestation underlies TEE remote attestation for AI workloads and chip location verification. For location, Scher and Thiergart note that if the chip's private key were extracted, its location could be spoofed 5.
Related
Used in
- ProposedChip location verification
- Research demoConfidential multi-party verification
- ProposedHardware-enabled guarantees (flexHEG) and guarantee processors
- Operational useHardware-attested weight binding⚠
- Research demoSafeguard attestation
- Operational useTEE remote attestation for AI workloads⚠
- Operational useApple Private Cloud Compute
- Research demoAttestable Audits
- Research demoCove Draft
- ProposedLucid sovereignty (location) certificates
- Research demoPAL*M Draft
- Research demoPySyft double-blind evaluations
- Research demoSAGE Draft
- Operational useTinfoil model identity (Modelwrap)⚠
- Operational useWhatsApp Private Processing
- Chips are where they are declared to be
- The declared evaluation was run
- The declared model is the one being served
- Declared safeguards were applied during inference
Sources
- Tier B. H. Birkholz et al. (2023). Remote ATtestation procedureS (RATS) Architecture (RFC 9334). Internet Engineering Task Force (RATS Working Group). Source recordSupports: purpose of attestation; Attester, Evidence, Verifier, Relying Party, Attestation Result; evidence generated with key material; nonces for freshness · §1; §3.1; §4; §10.2
- Tier A. National Institute of Standards and Technology (2026). NIST Computer Security Resource Center (CSRC) Glossary. NIST Computer Security Resource Center. Source recordSupports: NIST definition of attestation as signing measurements securely stored in hardware, which the requester validates · term: attestation (NIST SP 1800-19B)
- Tier B. Trusted Computing Group (2017). TCG Glossary. Trusted Computing Group. Source recordSupports: Root of Trust for Reporting provides authenticity and non-repudiation when attesting to platform characteristics · p. 9
- Tier B. Confidential Computing Consortium (2022). Common Terminology for Confidential Computing. Confidential Computing Consortium. Source recordSupports: attestability as an optional TEE attribute that confidential computing requires; attestation as validation of a hardware-signed report of TCB measurements · TEE attributes; attestation
- Tier B. A. Scher & L. Thiergart (2024). Mechanisms to Verify International Agreements About AI Development. Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Source recordSupports: an extracted private key would let a chip's location be spoofed · On-chip mechanisms for location verification