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Voltage Attacks Against Deep Learning Accelerators on Multi-Tenant FPGAs (arxiv.org)
1 point by godelmachine on Dec 18, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A circuit on a shared FPGA sags the power supply to make a neighboring deep-learning chip make timing mistakes, invisible to normal checks. The classifier kept its accuracy under the strongest attack at safe speed, and running faster gave 1.18–1.31 times more inferences without loss.

Abstract · Neighbors From Hell: Voltage Attacks Against Deep Learning Accelerators on Multi-Tenant FPGAs

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are becoming widely used accelerators for a myriad of datacenter applications due to their flexibility and energy efficiency. Among these applications, FPGAs have shown promising results in accelerating low-latency real-time deep learning (DL) inference, which is becoming an indispensable component of many end-user applications. With the emerging research direction towards virtualized cloud FPGAs that can be shared by multiple users, the security aspect of FPGA-based DL accelerators requires careful consideration. In this work, we evaluate the security of DL accelerators against voltage-based integrity attacks in a multitenant FPGA scenario. We first demonstrate the feasibility of such attacks on a state-of-the-art Stratix 10 card using different attacker circuits that are logically and physically isolated in a separate attacker role, and cannot be flagged as malicious circuits by conventional bitstream checkers. We show that aggressive clock gating, an effective power-saving technique, can also be a potential security threat in modern FPGAs. Then, we carry out the attack on a DL accelerator running ImageNet classification in the victim role to evaluate the inherent resilience of DL models against timing faults induced by the adversary. We find that even when using the strongest attacker circuit, the prediction accuracy of the DL accelerator is not compromised when running at its safe operating frequency. Furthermore, we can achieve 1.18-1.31x higher inference performance by over-clocking the DL accelerator without affecting its prediction accuracy.

Andrew Boutros, Mathew Hall, Nicolas Papernot, Vaughn Betz
arXiv:2012.07242 · cs.CR, cs.AR, cs.LG · submitted Dec 14, 2020 · updated Jul 8, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · Published in the 2020 proceedings of the International Conference of Field-Programmable Technology (ICFPT)

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