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Pull the Rug from Under: Malicious Reconfiguration of Executing Program in FPGA and its Defense

The Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) has been used for decades in embedded applications where custom hardware is not practical or feasible. However,
thanks to increases in size and compute capabilities, the FPGA has become more
attractive as an option to supplement a general-purpose Central Processing Unit
(CPU) for accelerating complex computations used for encryption, machine learning,
and many other applications. Although FPGAs have already appeared in embedded
Systems-on-Chip (SoC) and cloud environments, the reconfigurable nature of FPGAs creates security vulnerabilities not found in more traditional accelerators like
Graphics Processing Units (GPU). In this paper, we describe a vulnerability in an
Altera Cyclone V SoC and demonstrate an attack that exploits this vulnerability. We
propose a hardware modification that would provide a defense against this attack,
and we implement a Linux kernel module to demonstrate a proof-of-concept for this
hardware solution.

  1. 10.25394/pgs.7996406.v1
Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/7996406
Date10 June 2019
CreatorsMichael C. Glapa (5930636)
Source SetsPurdue University
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText, Thesis
RightsCC BY 4.0
Relationhttps://figshare.com/articles/Pull_the_Rug_from_Under_Malicious_Reconfiguration_of_Executing_Program_in_FPGA_and_its_Defense/7996406

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