sNPU: Trusted Execution Environments on Integrated NPUs

Trusted execution environment (TEE) promises strong security guarantee with hardware extensions for security-sensitive tasks. Due to its numerous benefits, TEE has gained widespread adoption, and extended from CPU-only TEEs to FPGA and GPU TEE systems. However, existing TEE systems exhibit inadequate and inefficient support for an emerging (and significant) processing unit, NPU. For instance, commercial TEE systems resort to coarse-grained and static protection approaches for NPUs, resulting in notable performance degradation (10%–20%), limited (or no) multitasking capabilities, and suboptimal resource utilization. In this paper, we present a secure NPU architecture, known as sNPU, which aims to mitigate vulnerabilities inherent to the design of NPU architectures. First, sNPU proposes NPU Guarder to enhance the NPU’s access control. Second, sNPU defines new attack surfaces leveraging in-NPU structures like scratchpad and NoC, and designs NPU Isolator to guarantee the isolation of scratchpad and NoC routing. Third, our system introduces a trusted software module called NPU Monitor to minimize the software TCB. Our prototype, evaluated on FPGA, demonstrates that sNPU significantly mitigates the runtime costs associated with security checking (from upto 20% to 0%) while incurring less than 1% resource costs.