AccGuard: Secure and Trusted Computation on Remote FPGA Accelerators

Abstract

Application-specific acceleration has prevailed in cloud computing and data centers. But the current infrastructure design provides little or no support for security in external accelerators. Existing trusted computing solutions such as Intel SGX or ARM TrustZone only target CPU-only environments, leaving external accelerators and peripheral devices unprotected. This work proposes AccGuard, a new scheme to extend trust computation for remote FPGA accelerators. AccGuard consists of a security manager (SM) with hardware root of trust and remote attestation through standard cryptographic primitives to form an enclave framework for FPGA accelerators. It minimizes the performance overhead (due to the security features) compared to a state-of-the-art CPU-based enclave framework, Intel SGX, while enjoying the benefit of improved performance through hardware acceleration.