A Software Integrity Authentication Protocol for Zero Trust Architecture

With the rapid expansion of network scale and the increasing complexity of network infrastructure, network boundaries have gradually blurred, traditional bound-based security models have gradually become ineffective to new application environment. In the literature, zero trust security model implements continuous verification and dynamic authorization for all access requests based on multi-dimensional factors such as the identity of the access subject. To safeguard against untrusted software and vulnerabilities, it is crucial to employ diverse technologies to protect software integrity and ensure system safety. This paper focuses on the research of software integrity authentication for the zero trust network. We create a master-slave collaboration environment of host and SSD in the zero trust network, where the host CPU is the dominant CPU and the SSD CPU is the slave CPU. We then design a software integrity authentication protocol for this zero trust architecture. The protocol does not require any hardware assistance and our experimental results show that it can defend against attacks through checksum correctness and verification-time validity.