International Association
for Cryptologic Research

DMTF is a standards organization by major industry players in IT infrastructure including AMD, Alibaba, Broadcom, Cisco, Dell, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, and NVIDIA, which aims to enable interoperability, e.g., including cloud, virtualization, network, servers and storage. It is currently standardizing a security protocol called SPDM, which aims to secure communication over the wire and to enable device attestation, notably also explicitly catering for communicating hardware components.

The SPDM protocol inherits requirements and design ideas from IETF's TLS 1.3. However, its state machines and transcript handling are substantially different and more complex. While architecture, specification, and open-source libraries of the current versions of SPDM are publicly available, these include no significant security analysis of any kind.

In this work we develop the first formal model of the SPDM protocol, notably of the current version 1.2.1, and formally analyze its main security properties.