An Integrity Checking Framework for AXI Protocol in Multi-tenant FPGA

Yukui Luo, Yuheng Zhang, Shijin Duan, Xiaolin Xu

Abstract: FPGAs have been widely deployed in cloud servers a promising computing infrastructure. It is envisioned that through the FPGA virtualization, multiple users will be able to share the hardware resources of an FPGA chip. Although bringing great benefits like highly efficient resource utilization, such multi-tenant cloud-FPGA also raises security concerns. While most existing works have demonstrated that an application running on a multi-tenant FPGA is vulnerable to fault injection attacks introduced by the power distribution network (PDN) disturbance on an FPGA, few of them consider the impact of such power attacks on the data interface of an FPGA. As a critical component in charge of the data transmission between intra-FPGA IPs and/or inter-FPGA components, the runtime integrity of the communication interface plays an essential role in the security of a multi-tenant FPGA. This work, we investigate the impact of the PDN-based fault injection attacks on the Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI) protocol as a case study. We find that like other circuit applications, the embedded AXI protocol interface also suffers from the PDN-based fault injection attacks, but with unique fault characteristics. To mitigate such vulnerabilities of the AXI in multi-tenant cloud-FPGA, we propose a runtime integrity checking framework. We evaluate the proposed framework with practical data transmission setup to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.