SecureComm: A Secure Data Transfer Framework for Neural Network Inference on CPU-FPGA Heterogeneous Edge Devices

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of heterogeneous computing systems in Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive data transferred between different elements has become a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose an enhanced security framework called SecureComm to protect data transfer between ARM CPU and FPGA through Double Data Rate (DDR) memory on CPU-FPGA heterogeneous platforms. SecureComm extends the SM4 crypto module by incorporating a proposed Message Authentication Code (MAC) to ensure data confidentiality and integrity. It also constructs smart queues in the shared memory of DDR, which work in conjunction with the designed protocols to help schedule data flow and facilitate flexible adaptation to various AI tasks with different data scales. Furthermore, some of the hardware modules of SecureComm are improved and encapsulated as independent IPs to increase their versatility beyond the scope of this paper. We implemented several ARM CPU-FPGA collaborative AI applications to justify the security and evaluate the timing overhead of SecureComm. We also deployed SecureComm to non-AI tasks to demonstrate its versatility, ultimately offering suggestions for its use in tasks of varying data scales.