Multi-Tenant FPGA-based Reconfigurable Systems: Attacks and Defenses

Partial reconfiguration of FPGAs improves system performance, increases utilization of hardware resources, and enables run-time update of system capabilities. However, the sharing of FPGA resources among various tenants presents security risks that affect the privacy and reliability of tenant applications running in the FPGA-based system. In this study, we examine the security ramifications of co-tenancy with a focus on address-redirection and task-hiding attacks. We design a counter-measure that protects FPGA-based systems against such attacks and prove that it resists these attacks. We present simulation results and an experimental demonstration using a Xilinx FPGA board to highlight the effectiveness of the countermeasure. The proposed countermeasure incurs negligible cost in terms of the area utilization of FPGAs currently used in the cloud.