A Survey on Security Concerns and Their Actual Solutions for using FPGAs in Cloud Computing

Abstract

Nowadays, FPGAs are essential tools for hardware accelerations in Cloud computing. However, a traditional architecture FPGA is still single-tenant, and the increasing demand for FPGAs in Cloud leads to the need for methods to supporting FPGA multi-tenancy. Moreover, it causes motivations of malicious users targeting FPGAs to exploit their security weaknesses. Therefore, an Trusted Execution Environment combining with high computational resources of the FPGAs gives new security opportunities for Trusted Computing. This paper analyzed FPGA security concerns in three criteria: software flaws, hardware flaws, and threat model with their relevant approaches to mitigate them. Finally, we explore new cloud security applications implementing FPGAs and TEE criteria.