Hacking the Fabric: Targeting Partial Reconfiguration for Fault Injection in FPGA Fabrics

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chaudhuri, Jayeeta, Nassar, Hassan, Gnad, Dennis R. E., Henkel, Jorg, Tahoori, Mehdi B., Chakrabarty, Krishnendu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Chaudhuri, Jayeeta
Nassar, Hassan
Gnad, Dennis R. E.
Henkel, Jorg
Tahoori, Mehdi B.
Chakrabarty, Krishnendu
author_facet Chaudhuri, Jayeeta
Nassar, Hassan
Gnad, Dennis R. E.
Henkel, Jorg
Tahoori, Mehdi B.
Chakrabarty, Krishnendu
contents FPGAs are now ubiquitous in cloud computing infrastructures and reconfigurable system-on-chip, particularly for AI acceleration. Major cloud service providers such as Amazon and Microsoft are increasingly incorporating FPGAs for specialized compute-intensive tasks within their data centers. The availability of FPGAs in cloud data centers has opened up new opportunities for users to improve application performance by implementing customizable hardware accelerators directly on the FPGA fabric. However, the virtualization and sharing of FPGA resources among multiple users open up new security risks and threats. We present a novel fault attack methodology capable of causing persistent fault injections in partial bitstreams during the process of FPGA reconfiguration. This attack leverages power-wasters and is timed to inject faults into bitstreams as they are being loaded onto the FPGA through the reconfiguration manager, without needing to remain active throughout the entire reconfiguration process. Our experiments, conducted on a Pynq FPGA setup, demonstrate the feasibility of this attack on various partial application bitstreams, such as a neural network accelerator unit and a signal processing accelerator unit.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_16497
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hacking the Fabric: Targeting Partial Reconfiguration for Fault Injection in FPGA Fabrics
Chaudhuri, Jayeeta
Nassar, Hassan
Gnad, Dennis R. E.
Henkel, Jorg
Tahoori, Mehdi B.
Chakrabarty, Krishnendu
Cryptography and Security
FPGAs are now ubiquitous in cloud computing infrastructures and reconfigurable system-on-chip, particularly for AI acceleration. Major cloud service providers such as Amazon and Microsoft are increasingly incorporating FPGAs for specialized compute-intensive tasks within their data centers. The availability of FPGAs in cloud data centers has opened up new opportunities for users to improve application performance by implementing customizable hardware accelerators directly on the FPGA fabric. However, the virtualization and sharing of FPGA resources among multiple users open up new security risks and threats. We present a novel fault attack methodology capable of causing persistent fault injections in partial bitstreams during the process of FPGA reconfiguration. This attack leverages power-wasters and is timed to inject faults into bitstreams as they are being loaded onto the FPGA through the reconfiguration manager, without needing to remain active throughout the entire reconfiguration process. Our experiments, conducted on a Pynq FPGA setup, demonstrate the feasibility of this attack on various partial application bitstreams, such as a neural network accelerator unit and a signal processing accelerator unit.
title Hacking the Fabric: Targeting Partial Reconfiguration for Fault Injection in FPGA Fabrics
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16497