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1. Power Side-Channel Attacks on BNN Accelerators in Remote FPGAs

   Moini, Shayan; Tian, Shanquan; Holcomb, Daniel; Szefer, Jakub; Tessier, Russell (June 2021, IEEE journal on emerging and selected topics in circuits and systems)

   null (Ed.)

   To lower cost and increase the utilization of Cloud Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), researchers have recently been exploring the concept of multi-tenant FPGAs, where multiple independent users simultaneously share the same remote FPGA. Despite its benefits, multi-tenancy opens up the possibility of malicious users co-locating on the same FPGA as a victim user, and extracting sensitive information. This issue becomes especially serious when the user is running a machine learning algorithm that is processing sensitive or private information. To demonstrate the dangers, this paper presents a remote, power-based side-channel attack on a deep neural network accelerator running in a variety of Xilinx FPGAs and also on Cloud FPGAs using Amazon Web Services (AWS) F1 instances. This work in particular shows how to remotely obtain voltage estimates as a deep neural network inference circuit executes, and how the information can be used to recover the inputs to the neural network. The attack is demonstrated with a binarized convolutional neural network used to recognize handwriting images from the MNIST handwritten digit database. With the use of precise time-to-digital converters for remote voltage estimation, the MNIST inputs can be successfully recovered with a maximum normalized cross-correlation of 79% between the input image and the recovered image on local FPGA boards and 72% on AWS F1 instances. The attack requires no physical access nor modifications to the FPGA hardware. 

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2. A Practical Remote Power Attack on Machine Learning Accelerators in Cloud FPGAs

   https://doi.org/10.23919/DATE56975.2023.10136956  

   Tian, Shanquan; Moini, Shayan; Holcomb, Daniel; Tessier, Russell; Szefer, Jakub (April 2023, 2023 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE))

   The security and performance of FPGA-based accelerators play vital roles in today’s cloud services. In addition to supporting convenient access to high-end FPGAs, cloud vendors and third-party developers now provide numerous FPGA accelerators for machine learning models. However, the security of accelerators developed for state-of-the-art Cloud FPGA environments has not been fully explored, since most remote accelerator attacks have been prototyped on local FPGA boards in lab settings, rather than in Cloud FPGA environments. To address existing research gaps, this work analyzes three existing machine learning accelerators developed in Xilinx Vitis to assess the potential threats of power attacks on accelerators in Amazon Web Services (AWS) F1 Cloud FPGA platforms, in a multi-tenant setting. The experiments show that malicious co-tenants in a multi-tenant environment can instantiate voltage sensing circuits as register-transfer level (RTL) kernels within the Vitis design environment to spy on co-tenant modules. A methodology for launching a practical remote power attack on Cloud FPGAs is also presented, which uses an enhanced time-to-digital (TDC) based voltage sensor and auto-triggered mechanism. The TDC is used to capture power signatures, which are then used to identify power consumption spikes and observe activity patterns involving the FPGA shell, DRAM on the FPGA board, or the other co-tenant victim’s accelerators. Voltage change patterns related to shell use and accelerators are then used to create an auto-triggered attack that can automatically detect when to capture voltage traces without the need for a hard-wired synchronization signal between victim and attacker. To address the novel threats presented in this work, this paper also discusses defenses that could be leveraged to secure multi-tenant Cloud FPGAs from power-based attacks. 

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3. RA-BNN: Constructing a Robust & Accurate Binary Neural Network Using a Novel Network Growth Mechanism to Defend Against BFA

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CCWC62904.2025.10903977  

   Rakin, Adnan Siraj; Yang, Li; Li, Jingtao; Yao, Fan; Chakrabarti, Chaitali; Cao, Yu; Seo, Jae-sun; Fan, Deliang (January 2025, IEEE)

   Adversarial bit-flip attack (BFA), a type of powerful adversarial weight attack demonstrated in real computer systems has shown enormous success in compromising Deep Neural Network (DNN) performance with a minimal amount of model parameter perturbation through rowhammer-based computer main memory bit-flip. For the first time in this work, we demonstrate to defeat adversarial bit-flip attacks by developing a Robust and Accurate Binary Neural Network (RA-BNN) that adopts a complete BNN (i.e., weights and activations are both in binary). Prior works have demonstrated that binary or clustered weights could intrinsically improve a network's robustness against BFA, while in this work, we further reveal that binary activation could improve such robustness even better. However, with both aggressive binary weight and activation representations, the complete BNN suffers from poor clean (i.e., no attack) inference accuracy. To counter this, we propose an efficient two-stage complete BNN growing method for constructing simultaneously robust and accurate BNN, named RA-Growth. It selectively grows the channel size of each BNN layer based on trainable channel-wise binary mask learning with a Gumbel-Sigmoid function. The wider binary network (i.e., RA-BNN) has dual benefits: it can recover clean inference accuracy and significantly higher resistance against BFA. Our evaluation of the CIFAR-10 dataset shows that the proposed RA-BNN can improve the resistance to BFA by up to 100 x. On ImageNet, with a sufficiently large (e.g., 5,000) number of bit-flips, the baseline BNN accuracy drops to 4.3 % from 51.9 %, while our RA-BNN accuracy only drops to 37.1 % from 60.9 %, making it the best defense performance. 

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4. AdverQuil: an efficient adversarial detection and alleviation technique for black-box neuromorphic computing systems

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3287624.3288753  

   Cheng, Hsin-Pai; Shen, Juncheng; Yang, Huanrui; Wu, Qing; Li, Hai; Chen, Yiran (January 2019, Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference)

   In recent years, neuromorphic computing systems (NCS) have gained popularity in accelerating neural network computation because of their high energy efficiency. The known vulnerability of neural networks to adversarial attack, however, raises a severe security concern of NCS. In addition, there are certain application scenarios in which users have limited access to the NCS. In such scenarios, defense technologies that require changing the training methods of the NCS, e.g., adversarial training become impracticable. In this work, we propose AdverQuil – an efficient adversarial detection and alleviation technique for black-box NCS. AdverQuil can identify the adversarial strength of input examples and select the best strategy for NCS to respond to the attack, without changing structure/parameter of the original neural network or its training method. Experimental results show that on MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, AdverQuil achieves a high efficiency of 79.5 - 167K image/sec/watt. AdverQuil introduces less than 25% of hardware overhead, and can be combined with various adversarial alleviation techniques to provide a flexible trade-off between hardware cost, energy efficiency and classification accuracy. 

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5. An Information Geometric Perspective to Adversarial Attacks and Defenses

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN55064.2022.9892170  

   Naddeo, Kyle; Bouaynaya, Nidhal; Shterenberg, Roman (September 2022, 2022 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN))

   Deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in complex tasks, sometimes outperforming human-level accuracy. Yet, they suffer from vulnerabilities known as adversarial attacks, which are imperceptible input perturbations that fool the models on inputs that were originally classified correctly. The adversarial problem remains poorly understood and commonly thought to be an inherent weakness of deep learning models. We argue that understanding and alleviating the adversarial phenomenon may require us to go beyond the Euclidean view and consider the relationship between the input and output spaces as a statistical manifold with the Fisher Information as its Riemannian metric. Under this information geometric view, the optimal attack is constructed as the direction corresponding to the highest eigenvalue of the Fisher Information Matrix - called the Fisher spectral attack. We show that an orthogonal transformation of the data cleverly alters its manifold by keeping the highest eigenvalue but changing the optimal direction of attack; thus deceiving the attacker into adopting the wrong direction. We demonstrate the defensive capabilities of the proposed orthogonal scheme - against the Fisher spectral attack and the popular fast gradient sign method - on standard networks, e.g., LeNet and MobileNetV2 for benchmark data sets, MNIST and CIFAR-10. 

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