AroMa: Evaluating Deep Learning Systems for Stealthy Integrity Attacks on Multi-tenant Accelerators

Multi-tenant applications have been proliferating in recent years, supported by the emergence of computing-as-service paradigms. Unfortunately, multi-tenancy induces new security vulnerabilities due to spatial or temporal co-location of applications with possibly malicious intent. In this article, we consider a special class of stealthy integrity attacks on multi-tenant deep learning accelerators. One interesting conclusion is that it is possible to perform targeted integrity attacks on kernel weights of deep learning systems such that it remains functional but mis-labels specific categories of input data through standard RowHammer attacks by only changing 0.0009% of the total weights. We develop an automated framework, AroMa, to evaluate the impact of multi-tenancy on security of deep learning accelerators against integrity attacks on memory systems. We present extensive evaluations on AroMa to demonstrate its effectiveness.