Improving the security of QEMU as a device emulator in Xen - Paul Durrant, Citrix Systems

Improving the security of QEMU as a device emulator in Xen - Paul Durrant, Citrix Systems

Recent developments in Xen and Linux now provide an environment in which it is possible to effectively limit the privilege of QEMU running as a device emulator in a privileged domain. This talk will discuss how dm (device model) op hypercall, file handle restriction in privcmd, libxentoolcore and the acquire_resources new memory op all contribute to the security of a system using QEMU as device emulator for untrusted guests

About Paul Durrant
Paul Durrant is a Senior Principal Software Engineer in the XenServer platform group of Citrix Systems R&D, based in Cambridge, UK. His chief responsibilities are Windows Paravirtual drivers, Virtual GPU subsystem, and the guest storage and network data-paths. His work has given him broad experience of Xen (hypervisor, tools and firmware), PV protocols and QEMU. Paul has been a kernel level programmer since he graduated from the University of Cambridge (BA CompSci) in 1994, generally specializing in network drivers. He spent several years in Solaris kernel group at Sun Microsystems where he was responsible for the kernel network driver interface (a.k.a. GLD) and then, prior to joining Citrix, Paul spent a few years at Solarflare Communications working on their user-space low latency TCP/IP stack.

[fbifido]

if we run all VM in a PVH mode + EFI, then can we do without QEMU?