CROSSING Research Seminar: Trust in Cloud FPGAs

Organizer: Johannes Braun, CROSSING

Abstract

In this talk we discuss the open paradoxical challenge of FPGA-accelerated cloud computing:

On one hand, clients aim to secure their Intellectual Property (IP) by encrypting their configuration bitstreams prior to uploading them to the cloud.

On the other hand, cloud service providers disallow the use of encrypted bitstreams to mitigate rogue configurations from damaging or disabling the FPGA. Instead, cloud providers require a verifiable check on the hardware design that is intended to run on a cloud FPGA at the netlist-level before generating the bitstream and loading it onto the FPGA, therefore, contradicting the IP protection requirement of clients.

Currently, there exist no practical solution that can adequately address this challenge. We present a practical solution that, under reasonable trust assumptions, satisfies the IP protection requirement of the client and provides a bitstream sanity check to the cloud provider. Our solution uses existing tools and commodity hardware.

Short Bio

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Links

• Talk: Online via Zoom
• Networking: Online – the link will be shared during the Zoom session