Hacking the Fabric: Targeting Partial Reconfiguration for Fault Injection in FPGA Fabrics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel fault injection attack targeting FPGA partial reconfiguration, exploiting power-wasters to cause persistent faults during bitstream loading, highlighting new security vulnerabilities in cloud FPGA deployments.

Contribution

It presents a new fault attack methodology that manipulates partial bitstreams during reconfiguration without continuous activity, revealing security risks in FPGA virtualization.

Findings

Feasibility demonstrated on Pynq FPGA

Effective on neural network and signal processing accelerators

Highlights security vulnerabilities in cloud FPGA use

Abstract

FPGAs are now ubiquitous in cloud computing infrastructures and reconfigurable system-on-chip, particularly for AI acceleration. Major cloud service providers such as Amazon and Microsoft are increasingly incorporating FPGAs for specialized compute-intensive tasks within their data centers. The availability of FPGAs in cloud data centers has opened up new opportunities for users to improve application performance by implementing customizable hardware accelerators directly on the FPGA fabric. However, the virtualization and sharing of FPGA resources among multiple users open up new security risks and threats. We present a novel fault attack methodology capable of causing persistent fault injections in partial bitstreams during the process of FPGA reconfiguration. This attack leverages power-wasters and is timed to inject faults into bitstreams as they are being loaded onto the FPGA through the reconfiguration manager, without needing to remain active throughout the entire reconfiguration process. Our experiments, conducted on a Pynq FPGA setup, demonstrate the feasibility of this attack on various partial application bitstreams, such as a neural network accelerator unit and a signal processing accelerator unit.