A way for a machine to prove to a remote party what hardware and software it is running, using evidence signed by a hardware root of trust.
In remote attestation, an attester produces signed evidence about its state: measurements of firmware, boot chain and software, often with a hardware-protected key. A verifier checks that evidence against reference values and policy, and a relying party acts on the result, for example by releasing a key.
This vocabulary comes from the IETF RATS architecture (RFC 9334). The evidence formats differ by platform: TPM quotes, Intel TDX and SGX quotes, AMD SEV-SNP reports, Arm CCA tokens, NVIDIA GPU reports.
Remote attestation answers one question at one moment. Re-attestation and continuous attestation keep the answer current.
Example. Before a bank's app sends a customer file to an AI service, it asks the service for evidence, checks it against the expected values and only then sends the file.
Working on re-attestation for your product? A first call takes 30 minutes and commits you to nothing. Bring your product and the one question that worries you.
Next fixed date: EU Digital Identity Wallets are due in every member state on 24 December 2026, 42 days from now.