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rFAS

Reconfigurable FPGA Accelerator Sandboxing

About rFAS

FPGAs are ideal for number crunching problems that fit dataflow processing model. With accelerator sandboxing the FPGAs provide a platform for executing these models. This platform is developed in the FOS - FPGA Operating System project.

But FPGAs have a huge surface of attack!

Remote DPA attacks

Aging with corrupted bitstreams

Power hammering attacks

For this research we have conducted a study on ring-oscillators and developed a virus scanner called FPGADefender.

rFAS Goals

Systematic review on possible FPGA attack scenarios

Develop mitigation strategies

Assessment of mitigation strategies and countermeasures

Secure multi-tenancy scenario

Publications

Anuj Vaishnav, Khoa Dang Pham, Joseph Powell, Dirk Koch: FOS: A Modular FPGA Operating System for Dynamic Workloads. ACM Trans. Reconfigurable Technol. Syst. 13(4): 20:1-20:28 (2020) https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3405794

Tuan Minh La, Kaspar Matas, Nikola Grunchevski, Khoa Dang Pham, Dirk Koch: FPGADefender: Malicious Self-oscillator Scanning for Xilinx UltraScale + FPGAs. ACM Trans. Reconfigurable Technol. Syst. 13(3): 15:1-15:31 (2020) https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3402937

Shaza Zeitouni, Jo Vliegen, Tommaso Frassetto, Dirk Koch, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Nele Mentens: Trusted Configuration in Cloud FPGAs. FCCM 2021: 233-241 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9443664

Tuan La, Kaspar Matas, Khoa Dang Pham, Dirk Koch: Securing FPGA Accelerators at the Electrical Level for Multi-tenant Platforms. FPL 2020: 361-362 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9221607

Khoa Dang Pham, Anuj Vaishnav, Joseph Powell, Dirk Koch: A Self-Compilation Flow Demo on FOS - The FPGA Operating System. FPL 2020: 368 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9221535

Tuan La, Kaspar Matas, Joseph Powell, Khoa Dang Pham, Dirk Koch: Demo: A Closer Look at Malicious Bitstreams. FPL 2020: 369 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9221591

Kaspar Matas, Tuan Minh La, Khoa Dang Pham, Dirk Koch: Power-hammering through Glitch Amplification - Attacks and Mitigation. FCCM 2020: 65-69 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9114608

Kaspar Matas, Tuan La, Nikola Grunchevski, Khoa Dang Pham, Dirk Koch: Invited Tutorial: FPGA Hardware Security for Datacenters and Beyond. FPGA 2020: 11-20 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3373087.3375390

Kristiyan Manev, Anuj Vaishnav, Dirk Koch: Unexpected Diversity: Quantitative Memory Analysis for Zynq UltraScale+ Systems. FPT 2019: 179-187 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8977835

Khoa Dang Pham, Kyriakos Paraskevas, Anuj Vaishnav, Andrew Attwood, Malte Vesper, Dirk Koch ZUCL 2.0: Virtualised Memory and Communication for ZYNQ UltraScale+ FPGAs FSP 2019 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8891818

Acknowledgements

This work is kindly supported by the National Cyber Security Centre of the UK through the project rFAS - reconfigurable FPGA Accelerator Sandboxing (grant agreement 4212204/RFA 15971)