The REWIRE Zero-Touch Onboarding framework yields several required benefits, such as scalability since supports mass onboarding of devices without human intervention, resilience with strong cryptographic guarantees prevent adversarial tampering, interoperability: W3C-compliant verifiable credentials allow integration across domains, privacy-preserving assurance since DAA ensures unlinkability, enabling sensitive operations without compromising anonymity and reduced operational overhead helping administrators to focus on policies, not on manual credential management.Let’s walk through a simplified narrative of what happens when a new device wants to join a REWIRE-enabled ecosystem
Firstly, the Authentication & VC Issuance generates a process which the device requests a challenge from the VC Issuer, and the manufacturer verifies the device using its Root ID Key. If the process is successful, the manufacturer signs the device’s generated key pair, and the Privacy CA issues a VC over the device’s attributes.
Secondly, during Domain Enrolment, the device presents its VC to the Domain Manager, who verifies the credentials and extracts policies, possibly querying a Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD) profile. Afterwards, attribute-based policies are generated and sent to the device to prove compliance through ABS or DAA, depending on the specific privacy needs.
Establishing Trust Channels for communication needs inside the domain, with ABS ensuring lightweight yet secure authenticated sessions and communication across domain operations, with ABSC guarantees encrypted, authenticated, and privacy-preserving data exchange. This results in a fully autonomous, cryptographically assured onboarding process.
Finally, on Security Analysis and Assurance the REWIRE Zero-Touch Onboarding scheme is not just operationally efficient; it is rigorously analysed for security properties (a) Authenticity: Devices are tied to hardware-level Root ID Keys, ensuring that only legitimate devices can join, (b) Privacy: With Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA), devices can participate in operations without leaking identifying information, critical for sensitive environments. (c) Non-repudiation: ABS and ABSC schemes ensure that all actions are attributable to cryptographically verifiable attributes, and Crypto-agility: The onboarding protocol allows different cryptographic schemes to be swapped as required, future-proofing the system against algorithmic weaknesses or post-quantum transitions.