Secure Hardware Kernels Execution in CPU+FPGA Heterogeneous Cloud

In this paper, we present a new security framework which allows controlled sharing and isolated execution of mutually distrusted FPGA-accelerators in heterogeneous cloud systems. The proposed framework enables the accelerators running in FPGAs in cloud computers to transparently inherit at run-time, software security policies of the virtual machines processes calling them. This capability allows system security policies enforcement mechanism to propagate access control privilege boundaries expressed at the hypervisor level, down to individual FPGA-accelerators. Furthermore, we present a software/hardware prototype implementation of the proposed security framework, showing that it can easily be transparently integrated within the virtual machine software stacks that run in today's cloud-based systems. Experimentation results show our proposed framework provides secure hardware execution with negligible execution overhead on guest VMs applications.