2. Outline
● What is the Cloud?
● Looking at HW based security
● Virtual Machine Introspection
● LibVMI
● Demos
● What’s next?
3. What is the Cloud?
Big Tech Technician End user
Management Developers Researcher
4.
5. Cloud Security
● Mainly an issue for the cloud providers
● They need to monitor their virtual hardware
● And for enterprise cloud applications
● They need to monitor their database and webapp
● An end user can only change his password
● He has no access to the underlying hardware/software
6. Cloud Security
● Co-resident/breakout attacks
● Possible
● Network based attacks
● Probable
● Attackers will go after the low-hanging fruit
● We need to leverage Cloud defense mechanisms
7. Why should you care?
● The technology powering the Cloud is also
available on end-user systems
● on your phone, PC, tablets..
● Defense mechanisms that work for the
Cloud will work for you!
26. 2008: Intel Management Engine
User
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30. Oh yea, we have these too..
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33. Securing Virtual Machines
● Security based on the Hypervisor
● Move security stack outside of the OS!
● Monitor
o VM Memory
o Virtual Hardware state
37. Isolation
● Move security component outside of the
guest operating system
● Hypervisor exposes a smaller attack surface
● Increasingly harder to tamper with or disable
security system
38.
39. Interposition
● Step into the execution of the machine
● Prevent attacks from modifying the system
(repair hooks, privileges, etc.)
● Needs to be fast, reliable, and stealthy
● Based directly on hardware events
42. Use cases
● System-level debugging
● Timeline or trend analysis
● Runtime security
● OS Integrity
● Malware analysis
● Forensics
43.
44. Core features
● Read and write VM memory
● Virtual Memory Translation (Paging)
o Using various methods (DTB, PID, Kernel Symbol)
● Find and map guest OS data structures
● Place monitoring event-hooks into the guest
o Exceptions, Page Faults
49. Future directions
● More guest OS support:
o Android, BSD, etc.
● More (and better) hypervisor support:
o KVM events, VirtualBox, Hyper-V, ESXi, etc.
● More events support on more platforms:
o AMD, ARM, Intel
51. Future directions in the Cloud
● Software developed with Cloud in mind
● Scalable Applications and Separation of
Tasks
● Enable VMI in the cloud
o The Software and Hardware is already available
o Cloud Providers do not provide access
