Criticality based Reduction of Security Costs in a FPGA based Cloud Computing Farm

Deployment of reconfigurable hardware or field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has gained significant attention after the advent of the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0, which aims at introducing reconfigurability in processing resources. However, vulnerabilities in hardware like hardware trojan horses can jeopardize real time operations associated with FPGA based cloud platforms. Hence, associating additional security elements that can provide runtime security is of utmost importance. Today, overhead associated with the introduced security elements in terms of resource and energy raise cost of operation as cloud adopters or users have to pay for security irrespective of the criticality of the task it intends to execute. Existing literature is silent on such an issue. In this work, our prime objective is to propose security as a cost based service. For this, we generate clusters for task execution as per security need, which can reduce not only cost of operation but also unnecessary overheads in terms of area and energy consumption. This facilitates sustainable computing. Task criticality and threat perception based security provisioning is novel among cloud service platforms.