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Security: VMware wrote a VMsafe paper back in 2002, says a blogger

Excerpt:

n this paper we present a new architecture for building intrusion detection systems that provides good visibility into the state of the monitored host, while still providing strong isolation for the IDS, thus lending significant resistance to both evasion and attack.

Our approach leverages virtual machine monitor (VMM) technology. This mechanism allows us to pull our IDS “outside” of the host it is monitoring, into a completely different hardware protection domain, providing a high-confidence barrier between the IDS and an attacker’s malicious code.

We achieve this through the use of a virtual machine monitor. Using this approach allows us to isolate the IDS from the monitored host but still retain excellent visibility into the host’s state. The VMM also offers us the unique ability to completely mediate interactions between the host software and the underlying hardware. We present a detailed study of our architecture, including Livewire, a prototype implementation. We demonstrate Livewire by implementing a suite of simple intrusion detection policies and using them to detect real attacks.


More link here.

Also a good friend of mine is looking for some ideas and wondering if the whole virtsec thing is a hype or a load of crap. Expect a discussion/article soon.
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