Exposition of Solutions to Hypervisor Vulnerabilities

Abstract

With the breakthroughs in VLSI technology and accumulative throughput of every device of the servers, there are huge amounts of computing power that could not be exploited completely or in an optimized way. By employing adequate utilization of hardware resources, virtualization technique has solved this problem. Virtualization is nothing but to abstract computer resources. It generates a virtual environment by separating user and applications from the distinct hardware features used by them to execute their task. The goal of developing a virtual environment is to enhance resource usage by aggregating miscellaneous and autonomous resources. Though the popularity of virtual machines is rising and they are being extensively adopted, the concept is however not new. A layer bounded by OS and the concealed hardware, is the omnipotent hypervisor which is the fundamental element of virtualization. It supervises the physical platform and accesses its entire resource set which consists of the memory allocated to the guest virtual machines (VMs). Not only as a medium of isolation and inspection, but also from the security point of view hypervisors, are extremely prominent. Using various architectures such as the HyperWall, NoHype and Coordinated IDS/IPS approach, we review the various solutions to tackle the threats associated with Hypervisor-secure virtualization.