Bugtraq mailing list archives
RE: VMWare poor guest isolation design
From: Arthur Corliss <corliss () digitalmages com>
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:22:08 -0800 (AKDT)
On Sat, 25 Aug 2007, Ken Kousky wrote:
I'm trying to understand how the vm actually prevents the buffer overflow from injecting code that has direct hardware control? It seems that the code injected into memory should be truly "arbitrary code" based on the physical machine.
First off, you need to understand what a buffer overflow is -- in most cases it's not an attack on the hardware, it's an attack on the process. Which is usually running in its own protected address space. In short, vms don't alleviate or protect you from buffer overflows (crap code is still crap inside of a guest), but running a service in a dedicated vm versus on a host with other concurrent services reduces the information leakage should the service be subverted. That's all. --Arthur Corliss Live Free or Die
Current thread:
- Re: More on VMWare poor guest isolation design, (continued)
- Re: More on VMWare poor guest isolation design Tim Newsham (Aug 27)
- RE: More on VMWare poor guest isolation design M. Burnett (Aug 27)
- RE: More on VMWare poor guest isolation design Tim Newsham (Aug 30)
- RE: More on VMWare poor guest isolation design Arthur Corliss (Aug 30)
- Re: More on VMWare poor guest isolation design Wietse Venema (Aug 27)
- Re: VMWare poor guest isolation design Matt Richard (Aug 24)
- Re: VMWare poor guest isolation design Arthur Corliss (Aug 24)
- RE: VMWare poor guest isolation design Ken Kousky (Aug 25)
- RE: VMWare poor guest isolation design Arthur Corliss (Aug 25)
- RE: VMWare poor guest isolation design Ken Kousky (Aug 27)
- RE: VMWare poor guest isolation design Arthur Corliss (Aug 30)