141–150 of 177 posts
So what is something running in this virtual machine allowed to do? Talk to the Internet? Talk to the screen? Talk only to whatever started it? How much of this is closed source?
This is probably for playing DRM content, apps like Netflix will provide an encrypted VM image to play a movie.
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It is still baffling that root is so shunned upon in the Android communities. Imagine not having root access to your linux laptop. Magisk users are persecuted and punished by Google for getting root access, which is the bare minimun for a device you own.
Easy, that is how many of us use UNIX like OSes, macOS, Windows devices on corporate environments. Not everyone gets to be root, and even for devs there are IT management tools that only allow root for specific use cases, or time boxed.
Looks like something absolutely overengineered and unnecessary. Why do you need a virtual machine with a separate kernel? Why do you need to protect it from kernel? I guess, it is made mostly for playing DRM content?
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Easy, that is how many of us use UNIX like OSes, macOS, Windows devices on corporate environments. Not everyone gets to be root, and even for devs there are IT management tools that only allow root for specific use cases, or time boxed.
Sure, you shouldn't always get to be root on other people's computers. But you absolutely should get to be root whenever you want on your own computers.
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Easy, that is how many of us use UNIX like OSes, macOS, Windows devices on corporate environments. Not everyone gets to be root, and even for devs there are IT management tools that only allow root for specific use cases, or time boxed.
Sure, you shouldn't always get to be root on other people's computers. But you absolutely should get to be root whenever you want on your own computers.
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No, I think the reason is that not letting user have full control over hardware is more profitable for manufactures, government and economy as a whole.
Anyone that misuses their root account to have an exploit taking place inside the organization gets shown the door.
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This is probably for playing DRM content, apps like Netflix will provide an encrypted VM image to play a movie.
DRM already uses a trusted execution environment (TEE), which provides more robust isolation than a VM. Thus I doubt needs of video streaming apps are the main motivation.
Looks like something absolutely overengineered and unnecessary. Why do you need a virtual machine with a separate kernel? Why do you need to protect it from kernel? I guess, it is made mostly for playing DRM content?
Normal apps usually don’t have the opportunity to run there, so this levels the playing field somewhat in terms of security.
And unless there is also attestation or binary encryption involved, I doubt this would give app developers any DRM-like capabilities.
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> if I spin up a VM with networking disabled I feel pretty confident I can run anything safely, even malware is not going to escape. You are putting too much faith in your VM monitor to keep you safe. There's a lot of attack surface in (for example) QEMU peripherals, and there's plenty of examples of VM escape [1]. CrosVM is probably the only publicly available VMM I'd be willing to trust, and even then I'd be nervou…
While QEMU uses C, which is not great, it has on its side 15+ years of hardening by the KVM developers. The problem with QEMU is not so much insecurity, it's that it contains the kitchen sink. However, most of the exploits you'll find in QEMU are against configurations that are never used in real world virtualization scenarios where guests are untrusted. You can recognize them because hardware not commonly used with…
In case anyone else needs a link: http://blog.vmsplice.net/2021/10/a-new-approach-to-usermode-...