research-article

Is It Approximate Computing or Malicious Computing?

Authors:

Gang QuAuthors Info & Claims

GLSVLSI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 on Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI

Pages 333 - 338

https://doi.org/10.1145/3386263.3407594

Published: 07 September 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Approximate computing (AC) is an attractive energy efficient technique that can be implemented at almost all the design levels including data, algorithm, and hardware. The basic idea behind AC is to deliberately control the trade-off between computation accuracy and energy efficiency. However, with the introduction of AC, traditional computing frameworks are having many potential security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we analyze these vulnerabilities and the associated attacks as well as corresponding countermeasures. More importantly, we propose the vulnerability at data level and demonstrate that without appropriate security mechanism, adversaries can modify the data and convert a secure and trusted AC process to one that produces unexpected errors in the final output. Furthermore, it is difficult to distinguish whether such errors are caused by the approximation nature of AC or from malicious modification and injection. Finally, we propose the information hiding based countermeasures to defend against both existing attacks and the proposed data level attacks, which helps to answer the question: given an error in AC, whether it comes from approximation or it is maliciously introduced.

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Cited By

Yellu PChennagouni NYu Q(2024)INEAD: Intermediate Node Evaluation-Based Attack Detection for Secure Approximate Computing SystemsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2023.332882643:3(716-727)Online publication date: Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2023.3328826
Japa AMiskelly JCui YO'Neill MGu C(2024)A Novel Methodology for Processor based PUF in Approximate Computing2024 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS)10.1109/ISCAS58744.2024.10558354(1-5)Online publication date: 19-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISCAS58744.2024.10558354
Badawi NMasadeh MAlShorman O(2024)Exploring Approximate Memory for Energy-Efficient Computing2024 ASU International Conference in Emerging Technologies for Sustainability and Intelligent Systems (ICETSIS)10.1109/ICETSIS61505.2024.10459495(1685-1689)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICETSIS61505.2024.10459495
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Is It Approximate Computing or Malicious Computing?
1. Security and privacy
  1. Security in hardware
2. Theory of computation
  1. Design and analysis of algorithms
    1. Approximation algorithms analysis

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cover image ACM Other conferences

GLSVLSI '20: Proceedings of the 2020 on Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI

September 2020

597 pages

ISBN:9781450379441

DOI:10.1145/3386263

General Chairs:
Tinoosh Mohsenin
University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA
,
Weisheng Zhao
Beihang University, China
,
Program Chairs:
Yiran Chen
Duke University, USA
,
Onur Mutlu
ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 September 2020

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GLSVLSI '20

GLSVLSI '20: Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI 2020

September 7 - 9, 2020

Virtual Event, China

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Overall Acceptance Rate 312 of 1,156 submissions, 27%

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Cited By

Yellu PChennagouni NYu Q(2024)INEAD: Intermediate Node Evaluation-Based Attack Detection for Secure Approximate Computing SystemsIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2023.332882643:3(716-727)Online publication date: Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2023.3328826
Japa AMiskelly JCui YO'Neill MGu C(2024)A Novel Methodology for Processor based PUF in Approximate Computing2024 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS)10.1109/ISCAS58744.2024.10558354(1-5)Online publication date: 19-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISCAS58744.2024.10558354
Badawi NMasadeh MAlShorman O(2024)Exploring Approximate Memory for Energy-Efficient Computing2024 ASU International Conference in Emerging Technologies for Sustainability and Intelligent Systems (ICETSIS)10.1109/ICETSIS61505.2024.10459495(1685-1689)Online publication date: 28-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICETSIS61505.2024.10459495
Damsgaard HOmetov ANurmi J(2023)Approximation Opportunities in Edge Computing Hardware: A Systematic Literature ReviewACM Computing Surveys10.1145/357277255:12(1-49)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3572772
Yellu PYu Q(2023)Securing Approximate Computing Systems via Obfuscating Approximate-Precise BoundaryIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2022.316826142:1(27-40)Online publication date: Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCAD.2022.3168261
Ahmed QAwais MPlatzner M(2023)MAAS: Hiding Trojans in Approximate Circuits2023 24th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED)10.1109/ISQED57927.2023.10129286(1-6)Online publication date: 5-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISQED57927.2023.10129286
Yellu PChennagouni NYu Q(2022)Leveraging Intermediate Node Evaluation to Secure Approximate Computing for AI Applications2022 IEEE International Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security (HST)10.1109/HST56032.2022.10025430(1-8)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/HST56032.2022.10025430
Li HPang YZhang JChen YZhirnov VSasan ASavidis I(2021)Security Enhancements for Approximate Machine LearningProceedings of the 2021 on Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI10.1145/3453688.3461753(461-466)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3453688.3461753

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