ShEF: Shielded Enclaves for Cloud FPGAs

Understand

FPGAs are now used in public clouds to accelerate a wide range of applications, including many that operate on sensitive data such as financial and medical records.

• We present ShEF, a trusted execution environment (TEE) for cloud-based reconfigurable accelerators.
• ShEF is independent from CPU-based TEEs and allows secure execution under a threat model where the adversary can control all software running on the CPU connected to the FPGA, has physical access to the FPGA, and can compromise the FPGA interface logic of the cloud provider.
• ShEF provides a secure boot and remote attestation process that relies solely on existing FPGA mechanisms for root of trust.