WeightLock: A Mixed-Grained Weight Encryption Approach Using Local Decrypting Units for Ciphertext Computing in DNN Accelerators

Jianfeng Wang, Zhonghao Chen, Yiming Chen, Yixin Xu, Tianyi Wang, Yao Yu, Vijaykrishnan Narayanan, Sumitha George, Huazhong Yang, Xueqing Li

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

With the wide use of NVM-based DNN accelerators for higher computing efficiency, the long data retention time essentially causes a high risk of unauthorized weight stealing by attackers. Weight encryption is an effective method, but existing ciphertext computing accelerators cannot achieve high encryption complexity and flexibility. This paper proposes WeightLock, a mixed-grained hardware-software co-design approach based on local decrypting units (LDUs). This work proposes a key-controlled cell-level hardware design for higher granularity and two weight selection schemes for higher flexibility. The simulation results show that the accuracy of VGG-8 and ResNet-18 in the Cifar-10 classification drops from 80% to only 10% even if 80% of keys are leaked. This shows >20% higher key leakage tolerance and >17x longer retraining latency protection, compared with the prior state-of-the-art hardware and software approaches, respectively. The area cost of the encryption function is negligible, with ~600x, 2.2x, and 2.4x reduction from the state-of-the-art cell-wise, column-wise, and 1T4R structures, respectively.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationAICAS 2023 - IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems, Proceeding
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
ISBN (Electronic)9798350332674
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Event5th IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems, AICAS 2023 - Hangzhou, China
Duration: Jun 11 2023Jun 13 2023

Publication series

NameAICAS 2023 - IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems, Proceeding

Conference

Conference5th IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems, AICAS 2023
Country/TerritoryChina
CityHangzhou
Period6/11/236/13/23

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Information Systems
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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