Lightweight Code Assurance Proof for Wireless Software

Software-defined radio (SDR) and the softwarization of the wireless and mobile systems enable intelligent processing and control in wireless networking. We design and build a lightweight code assurance proof scheme for wireless system software implementations. More specifically, our scheme assures that a wireless user/prover holds the correct software codes, e.g., the correct version, for its wireless networking implementations. In contrast to the previous research for code attestation in trusted computing, our scheme forgoes hardware-based security and real-time networking, thus substantially increasing the application feasibility. We further design our scheme to be efficient in computing by using a Merkle tree for the efficiency of the verification of the assurance proof. We implement our scheme for proof-of-concept on srsRAN (a popular open-source software for cellular technology) and conduct preliminary measurements to demonstrate the lightweight design. We envision our scheme to be orthogonal and supplementary to the previous trustworthy code attestation because it provides different properties (assurance vs. attestation) and because the lightweight aspect yields greater applicability and lower overheads in hardware and networking. Our scheme will therefore be appropriate for the wireless/mobile environment which uses broadcasting (where receiving/verifications occur more frequently than transmitting/generations) and whose devices are resource-constrained.