Breaking Virtualization by switching the CPU to Virtual 8086 Mode
- Type
- Slides
- Tags
- evasion, exploiting, virtualization, virtual machine, vulnerability
- Authors
- Jonathan Brossard
- Event
- Ruxcon 2010
- Indexed on
- Mar 26, 2013
- URL
- http://www.ruxcon.org.au/assets/Presentations/endrazine.breaking-virtualization.2010.pdf
- File name
- endrazine.breaking-virtualization.2010.pdf
- File size
- 5.0 MB
- MD5
- 4e3feff66faedc4b3b57301019ff3f0c
- SHA1
- c08e10d5df67514a470e82763498b718096f7336
In the last five years, virtualisation software has been massively adopted by companies as a means to reduce costs, achieve instant scalability and possibly better their security through isolation. Recent numbers indicate that 78 per cent of companies have their production servers virtualised, and 20 per cent of them actually only rely on virtualised servers. At the same time security auditing of such software poses unique challenges, in particular when it comes to dynamic testing. In this presentation, I describe a methodology for the security assessment of virtualisation software based on switching the CPU mode to virtual 8086 mode in order to get access to the (possibly virtualised) hardware, that aims at being both generic (applicable to both x86 and x64 architectures) and extremely large in terms of code coverage. I have implemented this technology under the form of a dynamic testing tool which has proved to be very efficient in finding bugs in virtualisation software.
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