What is Trusted Sensing?

Trusted sensing is the ability to produce sensor readings that instill a high degree of confidence about their integrity and authenticity. Today, it is trivial to fabricate sensor readings by simply making up GPS locations, camera shots, or health readings.

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Why Trusted Sensing in applications?

• Applications that collect proofs: These applications need to collect sensor readings and present them as “proofs” either immediately after they are collected, or at some later time. Sometimes these proofs are used to demonstrate the authenticity of content, as is the case with validating that photos have not been photoshopped. In other cases, such proofs are used to demonstrate a particular action or behavioral pattern of the user, as is the case with offering store discounts to loyal customers based on location proofs.

• Participatory sensing/crowd-sourcing applications: These applications upload sensor readings to the cloud. The cloud often combines readings from multiple users in a process referred to as crowd-sourcing, to build an aggregate view of data. This aggregate view is then offered as a cloud service to all users. This class of applications is subject to database manipulation attacks, where an attacker uploads fake sensor readings to the cloud. With sensor attestations, it is much harder for attackers to fabricate or alter sensor readings without being detected.

• Applications that use authentication: These applications need to perform a security-sensitive operation based on a sensor reading. For example, a user might get access to a secret file or password only when present at a specific location. Sometimes the secret might be revealed by the cloud, whereas in other cases the secret might be revealed by the local smartphone. In both cases, the secret is revealed based on the reading values of a trusted sensor. The sensor seal abstraction makes it easy to build such applications. The secret data can be first sealed according to a particular sensor-based policy. Any application that uses authentication can just issue an unseal operation to receive the secret data.