Multi-Tenant FPGA-based Reconfigurable Systems: Attacks and Defenses
Rana Elnaggar1, Ramesh Karri2 and Krishnendu Chakrabarty1
1Duke University
2New York University
ABSTRACT
Partial reconfiguration of FPGAs improves system performance, increases utilization of hardware resources, and enables run-time update of system capabilities. However, the sharing of FPGA resources among various tenants presents security risks that affect the privacy and reliability of tenant applications running in the FPGA-based system. In this study, we examine the security ramifications of co-tenancy with a focus on address-redirection and task-hiding attacks. We design a countermeasure that protects FPGA-based systems against such attacks and prove that it resists these attacks. We present simulation results and an experimental demonstration using a Xilinx FPGA board to highlight the effectiveness of the countermeasure. The proposed countermeasure incurs negligible cost in terms of the area utilization of FPGAs currently used in the cloud.
