Cryptographically Secure Multi-Tenant Provisioning of FPGAs

Abstract: FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate arrays) have gained massive popularity today as accelerators for a variety of workloads, including big data analytics, and parallel and distributed computing. This has fueled the study of mechanisms to provision FPGAs among multiple tenants as general purpose computing resources on the cloud. Such mechanisms offer new challenges, such as ensuring IP protection and bitstream confidentiality for mutually distrusting clients sharing the same FPGA. A direct adoption of existing IP protection techniques from the single tenancy setting do not completely address these challenges, and are also not scalable enough for practical deployment. In this paper, we propose a dedicated and scalable framework for secure multi-tenant FPGA provisioning that can be easily integrated into existing cloud-based infrastructures such as OpenStack. Our technique has constant resource/memory overhead irrespective of the number of tenants sharing a given FPGA, and is provably secure under well-studied cryptographic assumptions. A prototype implementation of our proposition on Xilinx Virtex-7 UltraScale FPGAs is presented to validate its overheads and scalability when supporting multiple tenants and workloads. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first FPGA provisioning framework to be prototyped that achieves a desirable balance between security and scalability in the multi-tenancy setting.