PLRAC : A PUF Characteristic Based Lightweight Remote Attestation for Container

ABSTRACT Container‐based cloud technology has been widely used in the digital transformation of enterprises, and the combination of cloud computing and container technology has achieved efficient resource management. However, container technology also has security weaknesses and vulnerabilities and is vulnerable to cyberattacks. Most of the existing security studies focus on specific vulnerabilities and subsystems and fail to provide reliable verification of the overall security of container environments. To solve this problem, the concept of container‐oriented PUF (CPUF) is proposed, which draws upon the characteristics of PUF. By integrating the PCR value from TPM with container attributes and encapsulating them through TEE, a unique and hardware‐secure container identity is generated, which enables container integrity verification. Simultaneously, a lightweight remote attestation for container (PLRAC) is proposed in this paper based on TEE and CPUF as the foundation of trusted root. By integrating PUF and TEE technology, this scheme achieves a low‐cost, high‐efficiency remote verification mechanism for container, effectively detecting whether containers have been tampered with or compromised. We formally verified the security of this scheme using the AVISPA tool and, combined with theoretical analysis, demonstrated its resistance to typical attacks such as replay and forgery. Performance evaluations indicate that compared to other authentication schemes, PLRAC reduces communication overhead by up to approximately 21.5% while providing additional security properties, such as anonymity and uniqueness.