Secure Shell Isolation for Multi-Tenant SoCs Against Data Eavesdropping
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing domain specific accelerator SoCs face challenges in ensuring confidentiality of tenant data while offloading workloads, as tenants may eavesdrop on each other's information and cloud providers may access encryption keys, necessitating enhanced security measures.
Innovation Solution
A secure shell is encapsulated around untrusted islands in the SoC, with a secure application programming interface and secure shell launcher to establish security protocols, preventing unauthorized access and ensuring confidentiality through NoC routing tables and gatekeepers.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If multiple tenants share the same hardware resources in domain specific accelerator SoCs, then resource utilization and performance are improved, but security and confidentiality of tenant data deteriorate as tenants may eavesdrop on each other's information
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides the SoC into distinct trusted and untrusted islands, creating separate execution environments for different tenants. Each tenant's workload is isolated in its own untrusted island, preventing cross-tenant eavesdropping while maintaining shared hardware resources. The trusted island contains security-critical components that mediate all communications.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces a gatekeeper as an intermediary component that controls all communications between untrusted islands and the trusted island. The gatekeeper enforces security policies, validates requests, and prevents unauthorized access or eavesdropping on tenant data while allowing legitimate resource sharing.
2Ease of operation
If cloud infrastructure providers manage encryption keys for tenants, then service convenience is improved, but security and confidentiality deteriorate as providers may access tenant keys
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts key management functionality from the untrusted tenant portion and places it exclusively in the trusted island. Encryption keys are generated, stored, and managed only within the trusted island's secure boundaries, ensuring that even the cloud provider cannot access them while still enabling convenient cryptographic operations for tenants.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates a hierarchical security architecture with two dimensions: untrusted islands for tenant workloads and a trusted island for security functions. This dimensional separation allows the system to provide convenient key management services while physically isolating key materials from any untrusted code, including provider access.
3Object-affected harmful factors
If a secure shell is added around untrusted islands to prevent eavesdropping, then security is improved, but device complexity increases due to additional circuitry and security protocols
Solution Approach 1:
The patent designs the gatekeeper and trusted island components to perform multiple security functions simultaneously: access control, encryption/decryption, authentication, and communication mediation. This multi-functionality provides comprehensive eavesdropping prevention without requiring separate dedicated circuits for each security function, thereby limiting complexity growth.
Data Source
AI summary
Embodiments herein describe a SoC with one or more untrusted islands that can host one or more roles or tenants in a data center environment (e.g., a cloud computing environment). In one embodiment, a secure shell encapsulates the untrusted islands with a secure application programming interface (API) to access other hardware resources in the SoC. Hardware resources in the SoC (e.g., HardIP, SoftIP, or both), can either be secure/trusted, or rely on the secure shell to ensure confidentiality.