Since FPGAs are now available in datacenters to accelerate applications, providing FPGA hardware security is a high priority. FPGA security is becoming more serious with the transition to FPGA-as-a-Service where users can upload their own bitstreams. Full control over FPGA hardware through the bitstream enables attacks to weaken an FPGA-based system. These include physically damaging the FPGA equipment and leaking of sensitive information such as the secret keys of crypto algorithms. While there is no known attacks in the commercial settings so far, it is not so much a question of if but more of when? The tutorial will show concrete attacks applicable on datacenter FPGAs. The goal of this tutorial is to prepare the FPGA community to impending security issues in order to pave way for a proactive security. First, we will give a tour through the FPGA hardware security jungle surveying practical attacks and potential threats. We will reinforce this with live demos of denial of service attacks. Less than 10% of the logic resources on an FPGA can draw enough dynamic power to crash a datacenter FPGA card. In the second part of the tutorial, we will show different mitigations that are either vendor supported or proposed by the academic community. In summary, the tutorial will communicate that while FPGA hardware security is complicated to bring about, there are acceptable solutions for known FPGA security problems.

As FPGAs are now offered on the cloud, this exposes many potential security issues. This PhD project investigates current security issues and challenges when deploying FPGAs in the cloud as well as using FPGAs in a multi-tenancy scenario. By addressing practical threats, and most importantly, proposing feasible countermeasures, this paper shows preliminary results on protecting FPGAs for multi-tenant scenarios.

As FPGAs are now offered on the cloud and widely used in critical applications (infrastructure, military, medical), this exposes many potential security issues in which attackers can deploy attacks remotely. This demo will take a closer look at malicious bitstreams and demo our FPGA bitstream virus scanner FPGADefender that can scan for signatures relating to malicious circuits and many forms of bitstream manipulations. Additionally, we show a deny-of-service power-hammering attack, which can serve as a template for hardware Trojans.