CryptoMMU: Enabling Scalable and Secure Access Control of Third-Party Accelerators

Due to increasing energy and performance gaps between general-purpose processors and hardware accelerators (e.g., FPGA or ASIC), clear trends for leveraging accelerators arise in various fields or workloads, such as edge devices, cloud systems, and data centers. Moreover, system integrators desire higher flexibility to deploy custom accelerators based on their performance, power, and cost constraints, where such integration can be as early as (1) at the design time when third-party intellectual properties (IPs) are used, (2) at integration/upgrade time when third-party discrete chip accelerators are used, or (3) during runtime as in reconfigurable logic.A malicious third-party accelerator can compromise the entire system by accessing other processes’ data, overwriting OS data structures, etc. To eliminate these security ramifications, a unit similar to a memory management unit (MMU), namely IOMMU, is typically used to scrutinize memory accesses from I/O devices, including accelerators. Still, IOMMU incurs significant performance overhead because it resides on the critical path of each I/O memory access. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, CryptoMMU, to delegate the translation processes to accelerators, whereas the authentication of the targeted address is elegantly performed using a cryptography-based approach. As a result, CryptoMMU facilitates the private caching of translation in each accelerator, providing better scalability. Our evaluation results show that CryptoMMU improves system throughput by an average of 2.97× and 1.13× compared to the conventional IOMMU and the state-of-the-art solution, respectively. Importantly, CryptoMMU can be implemented without any software changes.CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Security in hardware; • Hardware → Very large scale integration design.