A Hardware Security Isolation Architecture for Intelligent Accelerator
Author
Abstract

AI systems face potential hardware security threats. Existing AI systems generally use the heterogeneous architecture of CPU + Intelligent Accelerator, with PCIe bus for communication between them. Security mechanisms are implemented on CPUs based on the hardware security isolation architecture. But the conventional hardware security isolation architecture does not include the intelligent accelerator on the PCIe bus. Therefore, from the perspective of hardware security, data offloaded to the intelligent accelerator face great security risks. In order to effectively integrate intelligent accelerator into the CPU’s security mechanism, a novel hardware security isolation architecture is presented in this paper. The PCIe protocol is extended to be security-aware by adding security information packaging and unpacking logic in the PCIe controller. The hardware resources on the intelligent accelerator are isolated in fine-grained. The resources classified into the secure world can only be controlled and used by the software of CPU’s trusted execution environment. Based on the above hardware security isolation architecture, a security isolation spiking convolutional neural network accelerator is designed and implemented in this paper. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed security isolation architecture has no overhead on the bandwidth and latency of the PCIe controller. The architecture does not affect the performance of the entire hardware computing process from CPU data offloading, intelligent accelerator computing, to data returning to CPU. With low hardware overhead, this security isolation architecture achieves effective isolation and protection of input data, model, and output data. And this architecture can effectively integrate hardware resources of intelligent accelerator into CPU’s security isolation mechanism.

Year of Publication
2022
Date Published
dec
URL
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10063451
DOI
10.1109/TrustCom56396.2022.00135
Google Scholar | BibTeX | DOI