2024/01/12 by Sergiu Bursuc, Reynaldo Gil-Pons, Bursuc, Sergiu +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Access Control and Trust #Cryptography and Data Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Security and Verification in Computing
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2401.06626
openalex publication_date 2024/01/12 · openalex created_date 2024/01/16 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A Proof of Secure Erasure (PoSE) is a communication protocol where a verifier seeks evidence that a prover has erased its memory within the time frame of the protocol execution. Designers of PoSE protocols have long been aware that, if a prover can outsource the computation of the memory erasure proof to another device, then their protocols are trivially defeated. As a result, most software-based PoSE protocols in the literature assume that provers are isolated during the protocol execution, that is, provers cannot receive help from a network adversary. Our main contribution is to show that this assumption is not necessary. We introduce formal models for PoSE protocols playing against provers aided by external conspirators and develop three PoSE protocols that we prove secure in this context. We reduce the requirement of isolation to the more realistic requirement that the communication with the external conspirator is relatively slow. Software-based protocols with such relaxed isolation assumptions are especially pertinent for low-end devices, where it is too costly to deploy sophisticated protection methods.