Escaping VMware Workstation Through COM1
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Escaping VMware Workstation Through COM1
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Re: Escaping VMware Workstation Through COM1
#2Anyone know why some of the images are incredibly low resolution?
Re: Escaping VMware Workstation Through COM1
#3Anyone know why some of the images are incredibly low resolution?
If you look at the non-mobile version at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sIYgqrytPK-CFWfqDntraA_F... you'll see that the images have been resized to the width of the page, probably from much larger images, causing the text to be very small and fuzzy.
Re: Escaping VMware Workstation Through COM1
#4 COM1
Re: Escaping VMware Workstation Through COM1
#5Virtualization is a great tool for using "well behaved" programs. It's foolhardy to expect it to defend against sophisticated malicious software.
About 40 years ago IBM studied the security of their own VM technology. They found many exploitable bugs, and this was on a codebase that was probably less than 1% the size of VMware. I wrote more about IBM's findings on HN about 3 months ago:
Re: Escaping VMware Workstation Through COM1
#6That's not the only place that has poor isolation: clocks, cache, devices ...
virtualization comes with the lie of hardware isolation while devices are views on common peripherals that are isolated at application level by an incorrect abstraction.
jails and virtual machines alike are jails made of a strong but viciously brittling glass.
Re: Escaping VMware Workstation Through COM1
#7I disable any hardware in VMware guests that I don't need, like printers, speakers, or USB devices, to avoid exploits like this.
Re: Escaping VMware Workstation Through COM1
#8Remind me: Are modern hypervisors meant to securely contain guests? Because they advertise their presence pretty loudly, and there's nothing which motivates a jail-break like reminding the inmate they're in a cell.
Re: Escaping VMware Workstation Through COM1
#9Remind me: Are modern hypervisors meant to securely contain guests? Because they advertise their presence pretty loudly, and there's nothing which motivates a jail-break like reminding the inmate they're in a cell.
This is why I'm not a fan of public cloud virtualization for high security systems (PCI-DSS/HIPPA/etc).
In addition to the escapes, you need to contend with side channel timing observation and resource contention.
Re: Escaping VMware Workstation Through COM1
#10Well I suppose a guest with access the internet could also deploy malware to a website which is then visited by the host computer and downloads a hack that patches vmware to allow full host control from the guest.
Depends on what you mean by "escape".