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Temporal Thermal Covert Channels in Cloud FPGAs

Authors:

Shanquan Tian,

Jakub SzeferAuthors Info & Claims

FPGA '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

Pages 298 - 303

https://doi.org/10.1145/3289602.3293920

Published: 20 February 2019 Publication History

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Abstract

With increasing interest in Cloud FPGAs, such as Amazon's EC2 F1 instances or Microsoft's Azure with Catapult servers, FPGAs in cloud computing infrastructures can become targets for information leakages via convert channel communication. Cloud FPGAs leverage temporal sharing of the FPGA resources between users. This paper shows that heat generated by one user can be observed by another user who later uses the same FPGA. The covert data transfer can be achieved through simple on-off keying (OOK) and use of multiple FPGA boards in parallel significantly improves data throughput. The new temporal thermal covert channel is demonstrated on Microsoft's Catapult servers with FPGAs running remotely in the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). A number of defenses against the new temporal thermal covert channel are presented at the end of the paper.

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Bossuet LLara-Nino C(2025)Power and Frequency Intrinsic Channels on gem5IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers10.1109/TCSI.2024.343584172:2(671-684)Online publication date: Feb-2025
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Gu YZhao LLiu TWu S(2024)Evaluation of Thermal Stress on Heterogeneous IoT-Based Federated LearningElectronics10.3390/electronics1316314013:16(3140)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13163140
Trochatos TEtim ASzefer J(2024)Covert-channels in FPGA-enabled SmartSSDsACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems10.1145/363531217:2(1-23)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2024
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Index Terms

Temporal Thermal Covert Channels in Cloud FPGAs
1. Security and privacy
  1. Security in hardware
    1. Hardware attacks and countermeasures
      1. Malicious design modifications
      2. Side-channel analysis and countermeasures

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Published In

FPGA '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

February 2019

360 pages

ISBN:9781450361378

DOI:10.1145/3289602

General Chair:
Kia Bazargan
Univ. of Minnesota, USA
,
Program Chair:
Stephen Neuendorffer
Xilinx, USA

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 20 February 2019

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National Science Foundation

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SIGDA

FPGA '19: The 2019 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays

February 24 - 26, 2019

CA, Seaside, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 125 of 627 submissions, 20%

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FPGA '25

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sigda

The 2025 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays

February 27 - March 1, 2025

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Bossuet LLara-Nino C(2025)Power and Frequency Intrinsic Channels on gem5IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers10.1109/TCSI.2024.343584172:2(671-684)Online publication date: Feb-2025
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSI.2024.3435841
Gu YZhao LLiu TWu S(2024)Evaluation of Thermal Stress on Heterogeneous IoT-Based Federated LearningElectronics10.3390/electronics1316314013:16(3140)Online publication date: 8-Aug-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13163140
Trochatos TEtim ASzefer J(2024)Covert-channels in FPGA-enabled SmartSSDsACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems10.1145/363531217:2(1-23)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3635312
Gu YZhao LDeng BWu SLo DGamess E(2024)Evaluation of Thermal Stress on IoT-based Federated LearningProceedings of the 2024 ACM Southeast Conference10.1145/3603287.3651222(291-296)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603287.3651222
Etim ATian SSzefer J(2024)Extending FPGA Information Leaks with Trojan Phantom Circuits2024 International Symposium on Secure and Private Execution Environment Design (SEED)10.1109/SEED61283.2024.00011(1-10)Online publication date: 16-May-2024
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Fellah-Touta ABossuet LLara-Nino C(2024)High-Confidence Remote Power Analysis on Heterogeneous SoCsJournal of Hardware and Systems Security10.1007/s41635-024-00155-5Online publication date: 30-Dec-2024
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Proulx AChouinard JFortier PMiled A(2023)A Survey on FPGA Cybersecurity Design StrategiesACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems10.1145/356151516:2(1-33)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2023
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Aknesil CDubrova ELindskog NEnglund H(2023)A Near-Field EM Sensor Implemented in FPGA Configurable Fabric2023 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (TrustCom)10.1109/TrustCom60117.2023.00259(1908-1913)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2023
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Wang XHuang HChen RJiang YSingh AYang MHuang L(2023)Detection of Thermal Covert Channel Attacks Based on Classification of Components of the Thermal Signal FeaturesIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2022.318957872:4(971-983)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
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Stojilović MRasmussen KRegazzoni FTahoori MTessier R(2023)A Visionary Look at the Security of Reconfigurable Cloud ComputingProceedings of the IEEE10.1109/JPROC.2023.3330729111:12(1548-1571)Online publication date: Dec-2023
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Cross-VM Covert- and Side-Channel Attacks in Cloud FPGAs

Thermal and Voltage Side and Covert Channels and Attacks in Cloud FPGAs

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