Security challenges and opportunities in adaptive and reconfigurable hardware

Abstract

We present a novel approach to building hardware support for providing strong security guarantees for computations running in the cloud (shared hardware in massive data centers), while maintaining the high performance and low cost that make cloud computing attractive in the first place. We propose augmenting regular cloud servers with a Trusted Computation Base (TCB) that can securely perform high-performance computations. Our TCB achieves cost savings by spreading functionality across two paired chips. We show that making a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) a part of the TCB benefits security and performance, and we explore a new method for defending the computation inside the TCB against side-channel attacks.