UBITECH, a European software house specializing in advanced AI and cybersecurity solutions, announced today that Dr. Thanassis Giannetsos, Head of the Secure Systems & Trusted Computing Research Group, is among the authors of a new Internet-Draft published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF): “Direct Anonymous Attestation for the Remote Attestation Procedures Architecture.” The draft, developed within the IETF’s Remote ATtestation ProcedureS (RATS) Working Group, is co-authored with researchers from Fraunhofer SIT, the University of Surrey, and Microsoft, and is available at draft-ietf-rats-daa-09.
The draft maps Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA), a cryptographic group-signature scheme originally introduced by Brickell, Camenisch, and Chen, onto the RATS Architecture standardized in RFC 9334. It formally introduces the DAA Issuer as a new protocol entity within the RATS ecosystem, defining how it assumes the roles of Verifier, Relying Party, and Endorser across the DAA Join and Signing protocols. The core contribution is architectural: it allows an Attester’s Evidence to be cryptographically validated by a Verifier without revealing the Attester’s individual identity, replacing device-unique identity documents with a randomized, group-based credential. This directly addresses a growing concern in remote attestation deployments, where the conveyance of Evidence or Attestation Results can inadvertently expose personally identifiable or device-identifying information.
Notably, the draft’s Implementation Status section formally documents UBITECH’s open-source DAA-A library as the reference implementation supporting this specification. Listed at production-level maturity, the C library targets TPM 2.0-equipped platforms and the IBM TPM 2.0 simulator, and extends core DAA with attribute-based credentials and selective disclosure, allowing a Holder to prove possession of a Verifiable Credential and disclose only specific attributes, such as a threshold condition, while cryptographically shielding the rest. Built on mbedTLS and MIRACL Core’s pairing-friendly Barreto-Naehrig (BN-P256) curve, and using Schnorr-style zero-knowledge proofs for attribute commitments, the library also ensures unlinkability across multiple presentations by the same Holder. The project is released under the MIT license and is publicly available on GitHub.
Dr. Thanassis Giannetsos stated: “Seeing our DAA-A library referenced as running code within an IETF specification is exactly the kind of feedback loop that good standards work should produce. Direct Anonymous Attestation has been a well-studied cryptographic primitive for two decades, but bridging it into a coherent architectural role within RATS, one that Verifiers and Relying Parties can actually reason about and implement, is what turns theory into deployable infrastructure. Anonymity and selective disclosure are becoming non-negotiable requirements as attestation moves from isolated devices into large-scale IoT fleets, industrial control systems, and federated cloud environments, where uniquely identifiable Evidence is itself a liability. At UBITECH, we build our research to be implementable, not just publishable, and having the library adopted as the reference implementation for this draft validates that approach. It also reinforces the trajectory of our broader work on trusted computing, post-quantum resilient attestation, and privacy-preserving security architectures, which we continue to advance through European research initiatives.”
This contribution builds on Dr. Giannetsos’s ongoing engagement with the RATS Working Group, following his earlier editorial involvement in the “Remote Attestation with Multiple Verifiers” draft, and further consolidates UBITECH’s role in shaping the technical foundations of trusted computing at the IETF level, bridging applied cryptographic research with the standards infrastructure of the wider Internet.
