Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>The migration of critical infrastructure toward post-quantum cryptography, driven by the eventual deprecation of RSA and elliptic-curve schemes against quantum adversaries, exposes a practical gap: legacy industrial control system (ICS) field devices require trustworthy attestation of their firmware and runtime state, yet cannot host the dedicated security hardware ---Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs), FPGAs, or SGX enclaves---on which existing post-quantum attestation schemes depend. This paper presents a device attestation mechanism that requires no such hardware, operating entirely on unmodified commodity x86 platforms. The approach exploits the hibernation--resume cycle for a purpose beyond power management: hibernation converts the volatile, self-concealing runtime state of a live operating system into a static, externally measurable artifact, while leaving no operating-system code in execution. A bare-metal UEFI application then measures both platform firmware and the captured runtime image and produces a CRYSTALS-Dilithium signature over the measurement, seeded by on-die RDRAND entropy, after which the device resumes at its exact prior state. Because measurement and signing execute with no OS-level code running, evasion resistance follows under the stated assumptions from the execution model rather than from runtime detection logic, and---unlike boot-time attestation---the evidence reflects the device's current operational state rather than its state at last boot. We describe the integration of kernel-level state capture and UEFI post-quantum signing, evaluate the attestation latency and overhead, and compare the trust assumptions against TPM- and FPGA-based alternatives. The results indicate that post-quantum attestation of runtime state is achievable on legacy-compatible commodity hardware without any dedicated cryptographic coprocessor.</p>