Authentication and Confidentiality in FPGA-Based Clouds

FPGAs have gained popularity as efficient accelerators for cloud computing, offering high computational capabilities surpassing general-purpose processors and GPUs. Cloud providers such as AWS and Alibaba offer FPGA-based cloud services to meet users’ needs for acceleration, particularly for computationally intensive applications such as AI or ML algorithms. Cloud security is critical to cloud users. They require secure remote FPGA acceleration with minimal performance impact. Privacy and protection of sensitive intellectual property and data from the cloud provider is a requirement for the user. In this chapter, a state of the art on FPGA cloud architecture and authentication is detailed. To address FPGA cloud security challenges, an FPGA-based cloud authentication and access delegation framework utilizing OAuth 2.0 is proposed. This protocol is adapted to FPGA cloud to securely authenticate entities involved in remote FPGA provisioning, enhancing overall security and flexibility with a tokenized access scheme.