Analysis of Ways of Digital Rights Management for FPGA-as-a-Service for AI-Based Solutions

In this work the analysis of possible ways of providing of identification mechanism for licensing of instances of FPGA projects is carried out. The challenges of creating AI services on FGPGA-platform and the feasibility of implementation of renting procedures for them are observed. The analysis shows that the service model involves the purchase or lease of server equipment with access to FPGA resources in a form of dedicated boards or the ability to deploy a set of assets for a particular user. It’s shown that organizing licensed access to these resources and ensuring their availability for centralized use becomes imperative. It is necessary to organize security measures. For that built-in features of FPGA chip that contain Unique Identifier (UID) of each chip element within a specific board can be used. Given the extensive application of FPGA technologies in the development of FPGA-based (FaaS) AI-oriented services, there arises a demand for the management of digital rights concerning the utilization for AI products in form of Intellectual Property cores (IP-cores).