Self attestation of things

Abstract

Various devices including our mobile phones are increasingly used as the intermediary (gateway) between IoT peripherals (like the smart lock at our homes) and the larger cloud infrastructure. In this paper we introduce the novel notion of Caveat instances on the cloud together with a novel application of MQTT (the communication protocol designed for peripherals) to stamp our will on how data about us can be used when it travels and resides outside our immediate boundary. Even when we cannot keep our personal data private, we can still prevent it from being misused, for example to commit identity theft, by ensuring that the attacker cannot produce an appropriate attestation for the data.