Copyright © (2008) by IEEE. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distrubuted for profit. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
VMMs have become an attractive way to improve system security by providing strong partitioning between different guest operating systems. However, the primary reason to believe that a VMM can create stronger partitions between guest operating systems than the operating system can create partitions between processes is that the VMM is much smaller and simpler than the operating system. Madnick and Donovan [20] first proposed VMMs for security in 1973 by pointing out that “… since virtual machine monitors tend to be shorter, simpler, and easier to debug than conventional multiprogramming operating systems, … the VMM is less error-prone.” One difficult problem in keeping a VMM small is the complexity of modern I/O architectures and devices. Many current hypervisors move the large, complex, and sometimes proprietary device drivers out of the VMM, into one or more guest partitions which causes inherent tradeoffs in complexity, security and performance. This paper discusses these tradeoffs.
By: Paul A. Karger; David R. Safford
Published in: IEEE Security & Privacy, volume 6, (no 5), pages 16-23 in 2008
LIMITED DISTRIBUTION NOTICE:
This Research Report is available. This report has been submitted for publication outside of IBM and will probably be copyrighted if accepted for publication. It has been issued as a Research Report for early dissemination of its contents. In view of the transfer of copyright to the outside publisher, its distribution outside of IBM prior to publication should be limited to peer communications and specific requests. After outside publication, requests should be filled only by reprints or legally obtained copies of the article (e.g., payment of royalties). I have read and understand this notice and am a member of the scientific community outside or inside of IBM seeking a single copy only.
Questions about this service can be mailed to reports@us.ibm.com .