Code Attestation with Compressed Instruction Code

Available purely software based code attestation protocols have recently been shown to be cheatable. In this work we propose to upload compressed instruction code to make the code attestation protocol robust against a so called com- presssion attack. The described secure code attestation pro- tocol makes use of recently proposed micro-controller archi- tectures for reading out compressed instruction code. We point out that the proposed concept only makes sense if the provided cost/benefit ratio for the aforementioned micro- controller is higher than an alternative hardware based so- lution requiring a tamper-resistant hardware module.