This September, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group published a new Internet-Draft, “Direct Anonymous Attestation for the Remote Attestation Procedures Architecture” (draft-ietf-rats-daa-08), which integrates the Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) implementation developed by our partners at UBITECH. This advancement consolidates privacy-preserving platform authentication and attestation, fully aligned with the IETF RATS standards,an important step toward more secure and trustworthy digital infrastructures.
The draft, co-edited by Dr. Thanassis Giannetsos, Head of Secure Systems & Trusted Computing (SST) at UBITECH and CASTOR Horizon’s Technical Coordinator, formally recognizes advancements in modern attestation standards. UBITECH’s DAA modular implementation was architected by Mr. Stefanos Vasileiadis, Tech Leader for Trusted Computing at UBITECH’s SST Research Group, and designed to be agnostic to the underlying Hardware-based Root of Trust.
This milestone underscores UBITECH’s contributions in the ongoing standardization efforts towards privacy-preserving (implicit) attestation technologies, an achievement that also benefits the CASTOR project offerings:CASTOR leverages these same trusted computing principles to enable the establishment of secure and trusted “service segments” that operate on top of attested and verified routing elements across the continuum. The work presented in IETF sets the scene for CASTOR’s novel composite attestation designs that are under construction and will be presented as part of IETF’s Trusted Path Routing draft work.
Key Highlights & Strategic Relevance
The new IETF draft marks an important validation of UBITECH’s (and by extension, CASTOR’s) contributions to the field of trusted computing and privacy-enhancing security frameworks. It formally integrates a modular Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) implementation instance into the IETF RATS architecture, providing a harmonized, common base foundation for anonymous, verifiable device trust.
Dr. Giannetsos, together with Mr. Vasileiadis, helped define how DAA fits within the RATS ecosystem – balancing strong, cryptographically verifiable trust with device anonymity. The draft also acknowledges UBITECH’s TPM Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) Library as the reference open-source implementation reinforcing the team’s commitment to open, interoperable security technologies.
The inclusion of DAA within the RATS architecture paves the way for privacy-preserving remote attestation, where devices can prove integrity without disclosing unique identifiers. This capability is vital for domains like IoT, edge computing, and multi-tenant cloud infrastructures, precisely the environments CASTOR is securing through its Trust-Aware Framework.
“This adoption by IETF validates our long-term vision of privacy-preserving trusted computing,” said Dr. Thanassis Giannetsos. “It demonstrates that, at Ubitech, we’re not just contributing to attestation standards, we’re shaping them. Our goal remains to deliver open, practical, and high-assurance implementations that advance both innovation and trust. Such advanced attestation mechanisms are also the basis behind CASTOR’s novel composite attestation variants that are currently been designed for enabling the verifiable sharing of (runtime) device states based on which the trust assessment of the entire routing path can occur. CASTOR aims to be one of the first to coalesce RATS-aligned concepts and static trusted path routing establishment primitives for unlocking the new generation of traffic engineering mechanisms, engraining trust as part of the path establishment process.“, added Dr. Giannetsos
The publication of this IETF draft strengthens not only UBITECH’s standing in the cybersecurity and standardization landscape but also CASTOR’s mission to develop and integrate advanced, privacy-aware security mechanisms across Europe’s digital ecosystems.
