Gotcha! I Know What You Are Doing on the FPGA Cloud: Fingerprinting Co-Located Cloud FPGA Accelerators via Measuring Communication Links

In recent decades, due to the emerging requirements of computation acceleration, cloud FPGAs have become popular in public clouds. Major cloud service providers, e.g. AWS and Microsoft Azure have provided FPGA computing resources in their infrastructure and have enabled users to design and deploy their own accelerators on these FPGAs. Multi-tenancy FPGAs, where multiple users can share the same FPGA fabric with certain types of isolation to improve resource efficiency, have already been proved feasible. However, this also raises security concerns. Various types of side-channel attacks targeting multi-tenancy FPGAs have been proposed and validated. The awareness of security vulnerabilities in the cloud has motivated cloud providers to take action to enhance the security of their cloud environments. In FPGA security research papers, researchers always perform attacks under the assumption that attackers successfully co-locate with victims and are aware of the existence of victims on the same FPGA board. However, the way to reach this point, i.e., how attackers secretly obtain information regarding accelerators on the same fabric, is constantly ignored despite the fact that it is non-trivial and important for attackers. In this paper, we present a novel fingerprinting attack to gain the types of co-located FPGA accelerators. We utilize a seemingly non-malicious benchmark accelerator to sniff the communication link and collect performance traces of the FPGA-host communication link. By analyzing these traces, we are able to achieve high classification accuracy for fingerprinting co-located accelerators, which proves that attackers can use our method to perform cloud FPGA accelerator fingerprinting with a high success rate. As far as we know, this is the first paper targeting multi-tenant FPGA accelerator fingerprinting with the communication side-channel.