VMware Chief Scientist developed VMsafe in 2002
Christorfer Hoff, Chief Security Architect at Unisys, spotted a whitepaper presented in 2002 by Tal Garfienkel and Mendel Rosenblum (already co-founder of VMware at that time) about a project called LiveWire, a new approach to deliver host-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) through hardware virtualization:
Today’s architectures for intrusion detection force the IDS designer to make a difficult choice. If the IDS resides on the host, it has an excellent view of what is happening in that host’s software, but is highly susceptible to attack. On the other hand, if the IDS resides in the network, it is more resistant to attack, but has a poor view of what is happening inside the host, making it more susceptible to evasion. In this paper we present an architecture that retains the visibility of a host-based IDS, but pulls the IDS outside of the host for greater attack resistance. 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.
Six years later VMware is finally about to release a set of APIs called VMsafe, which seems to do exactly the same thing.
 |
 |
This implies that, until VMware releases more details about VMsafe, this is the most detailed documentation available about the upcoming architecture.
Read the whole paper at source.
virtualization.info Newest articles
May 21st, 2012
In this post, published on May 18 in VROOM! Blog, the VMware’s Performance Team presented some of the most significant enhancements and optimizations brought to Teradici‘s PCoIP protocol in the…
May 17th, 2012
On May 15th NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA® VGX™ platform that will be available later this year through NVIDIA’s hardware OEM and VDI partners.
This new platform promises to deliver…
May 17th, 2012
Microsoft announced this week the new Beta version of its capacity planning tool Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) 7.0 Beta.
The Beta program opened on May 15th and the review…
May 15th, 2012
Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.
vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric…
May 15th, 2012
On April 4 Stephen Herrod, VMware’s CTO, has attended, as guest speaker, at a VMUG meeting in Italy.
One of the key point of the speech, documented in one hour-long…
May 14th, 2012
Last week Citrix announced a new tech preview for Hosted Server VDI technology that allows cloud providers to leverage Microsoft SPLA to host VDI-style desktops obtaining a pay-as-you-go monthly subscription licensing…
May 11th, 2012
On May 7 Atlantis Computing announced the general availability of its Atlantis ILIO Diskless VDI 3.2, this product, tailored in particular for VMware View 5.1, enables virtual desktops deployment…
May 11th, 2012
On May 7 Citrix announced a technology preview of Project Aruba that extends Citrix VDI all-in-one proposal for the SMB market, VDI-in-a-Box, with personal vDisk technology.
VDI-in-a-Box, inherited from Kaviza…
May 10th, 2012
On May 7 Cloud Sidekick announced the Early Access Program release of Cato Enterprise Edition (EE) which extends the Community Edition (CE) with Storm Deployment Automation and support for…
May 9th, 2012
On April 26 VMware announced the general availability of VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) 1.1, previously introduced as a part of vCenter Operations Management Suite.
VIN automatically detects, discovers and…
May 8th, 2012
On May 3 VMware released a security update, that the company itself define as “accelerated“, with the purpose to patch five “critical” security issues across VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisor…
May 7th, 2012
On May 3 VMware announced it has joined the Facebook Open Compute Project, an initiative launched in 2011, with the objective of increase technology efficiencies and reduce the environmental impact…
May 7th, 2012
On April 24 VMware published a technical paper titled: The VMware Reference Architecture for Stateless Virtual Desktops on Local Solid-State Storage with VMware View 5 which introduce the use of…
May 4th, 2012
On May 2 Liquidware Lab, the company founded in 2008 by David Bieneman, announced a new product called FlexApp and version 5.0 of its Stratusphere FIT, Stratusphere UX and…
Copyright © 2003-2012 virtualization.info. All rights reserved.
virtualization.info | cloudcomputing.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress