A novel delay-resilient remote memory attestation for smart grid

Smart measurement devices play an important role in smart grid and might always be connected through open network interfaces. In this scenario, the adversary could launch code injection attacks to compromise these measurement devices and gain benefits by these compromised devices. To deal with this issue, a number of attestation schemes have been designed to defense the malicious attacks in the past. However, because the detection methods of these schemes are based on extra CPU clock cycles, they could be ineffective when the network delivery delay is significant. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a novel Delay-resilient Remote Memory Attestation scheme (DRMA), which can eliminate the impact of network delivery delay in the multi-hop networks and achieve great accuracy on compromised measurement devices detection. Specially, without sending beacon packets periodically, the proposed scheme can not only get the real-time end-to-end delay via evaluating the time difference reported by the relay nodes in the challenge-response attestation process, but also reduce the network load and achieve great accuracy of network delay. Via extensive theoretical analysis and experiments, our scheme shows better performance and less computing overhead in comparison with existing schemes.