Rollback attacks

A rollback attack serves metadata or software that was once valid but is now older than the state the device has accepted. A valid signature by itself does not prevent this.

The TUF client persists trusted metadata versions and refuses lower versions. Snapshot metadata fixes the version of targets metadata, while target metadata fixes the exact bytes. Root rotation is also monotonic, so an attacker cannot replace the current root with an older trusted root.

This security check is different from operational rollback. Meshanics may deliberately restore a retained previous payload when a candidate health check fails. That restore is a customer-authorized recovery action recorded by the rollout, not acceptance of attacker-supplied old repository metadata.

Read Rollback safety for adapter recovery and Freeze attacks for stale-but-current replay.