SGX-FPGA: Trusted Execution Environment for CPU-FPGA Heterogeneous Architecture

Trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX, have become a popular security primitive with minimum trusted computing base (TCB) and attack surface. However, the existing CPU-based TEEs do not support FPGAs, even though FPGA-based cloud computing services have been rapidly deployed with security vulnerabilities that are expected to be eliminated by TEEs. To fill the gap, we present SGX-FPGA, a trusted hardware isolation path enabling the first FPGA TEE by bridging SGX enclaves and FPGAs in the heterogeneous CPU-FPGA architecture. Our experiments on real CPU-FPGA hardware justify the high security and low performance overhead achieved by SGX-FPGA.