A study of security issues in I/O virtualization

Gabor PEK - scientific visitor, RS department
Digital Security

Date: -
Location: Eurecom

In this paper we study the memory protection and I/O mechanisms that exist to isolate and secure an hypervisor against software-based attacks. Our goal is not to present a survey of virtualization techniques, neither to study the broad area of virtualization security. Instead, our purpose is to shed light into the complex problem of memory protection and I/O management. At a first glance this topic may seem extremely small but, as we will see in the rest of the paper, in the last ten years a large number of papers, products, and techniques have been presented in this area.