arXiv subjects

Russell Tessier

Publications and source records attributed to Russell Tessier.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Security Risks Due to Data Persistence in Cloud FPGA Platforms

The integration of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) into cloud computing systems has become commonplace. As the operating systems used to manage these systems evolve, special consideration must be given to DRAM devices accessible by FPGAs. These devices may hold sensitive data that can become inadvertently exposed to adversaries following user logout. Although addressed in some cloud FPGA environments, automatic DRAM clearing after process termination is not automatically included in popular FPGA runtime environments nor in most proposed cloud FPGA hypervisors. In this paper, we examine DRAM data persistence in AMD/Xilinx Alveo U280 nodes that are part of the Open Cloud Testbed (OCT). Our results indicate that DDR4 DRAM is not automatically cleared following user logout from an allocated node and subsequent node users can easily obtain recognizable data from the DRAM following node reallocation over 17 minutes later. This issue is particularly relevant for systems which support FPGA multi-tenancy.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Power Side-Channel Attacks on BNN Accelerators in Remote FPGAs

To lower cost and increase the utilization of Cloud Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), researchers have recently been exploring the concept of multi-tenant FPGAs, where multiple independent users simultaneously share the same remote FPGA. Despite its benefits, multi-tenancy opens up the possibility of malicious users co-locating on the same FPGA as a victim user, and extracting sensitive information. This issue becomes especially serious when the user is running a machine learning algorithm that is processing sensitive or private information. To demonstrate the dangers, this paper presents a remote, power-based side-channel attack on a deep neural network accelerator running in a variety of Xilinx FPGAs and also on Cloud FPGAs using Amazon Web Services (AWS) F1 instances. This work in particular shows how to remotely obtain voltage estimates as a deep neural network inference circuit executes, and how the information can be used to recover the inputs to the neural network. The attack is demonstrated with a binarized convolutional neural network used to recognize handwriting images from the MNIST handwritten digit database. With the use of precise time-to-digital converters for remote voltage estimation, the MNIST inputs can be successfully recovered with a maximum normalized cross-correlation of 79% between the input image and the recovered image on local FPGA boards and 72% on AWS F1 instances. The attack requires no physical access nor modifications to the FPGA hardware.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2016

Soft GPGPUs for Embedded FPGAs: An Architectural Evaluation

We present a customizable soft architecture which allows for the execution of GPGPU code on an FPGA without the need to recompile the design. Issues related to scaling the overlay architecture to multiple GPGPU multiprocessors are considered along with application-class architectural optimizations. The overlay architecture is optimized for FPGA implementation to support efficient use of embedded block memories and DSP blocks. This architecture supports direct CUDA compilation of integer computations to a binary which is executable on the FPGA-based GPGPU. The benefits of our architecture are evaluated for a collection of five standard CUDA benchmarks which are compiled using standard GPGPU compilation tools. Speedups of 44x, on average, versus a MicroBlaze microprocessor are achieved. We show dynamic energy savings versus a soft-core processor of 80% on average. Application-customized versions of the soft GPGPU can be used to further reduce dynamic energy consumption by an average of 14%.

cs.AR↗