Virtualization Rootkit Wars

VMM malware is another side-effect of creating illusions (See my previous blog entry on the danger of illusions). It turns out that still waters run very deep. Here's a potted summary of some recent events in the world of stealth that have impinged on both VMM security issues and performance analysis. (The following contains a lot of acronyms, for which I've provided a glossary at the end).

Last year at BlackHat, some Polish security experts announced a proof-of-concept for a VME rootkit called "Blue Pill " (BP) that they claimed was undetectable. For BlackHat 2007, some U.S. security experts challenged the Polish team to a Detect-A-Thon (my term). This caused the Polish team to go into defensive posture and make a list of run-rules (my term) for how the Detect-A-Thon was to be carried out. Since BP is only a virtual rootkit (if I can use that term), one of the proposed run-rules was payment (up front?) of almost $500,000 for development costs to make a real implementation of BP battle ready. Nice work if you can get it.

Quite apart from all these claim-counter-claim machinations, what got my attention was one of the ways by which the U.S. team claimed that BP would be detectable (there are plausibly many) viz., counting execution cycles. The CPUID instruction, in particular, is supposed to only take 200 cycles (as root), not 5000 cycles (non-root). I saw a certain irony in the fact that, although I've been complaining about VMM illusions masking correct performance analysis, performance analysis is one method for detecting HVM malware. The procedure is analogous to the analysis in Section 3.2.2. of my CMG 2006 paper "The Virtualization Spectrum from Hyperthreads to GRIDs" where I showed that the increase in thread execution time is due mostly to an inflation of the thread service time on a dual-core. There, I had to infer the effect from system-level measurements whereas here, they are talking about reading the actual cycle counter/register directly. It turns out that this technique is not totally foolproof either, because the timings can be masked with the appropriate trap. Looking for changes in the TLB is another method that has been proposed. Naturally, in this kind of game, the beat goes on and although rootkit detectors are already available, there will be many more as VMM stealth techniques evolve.

Glossary

• BP: "Blue Pill". An HVM rootkit.
  
• CPUID: x86 instruction to identify the CPU type.
  
• Guest: VMWare lingo for a native O/S that runs on a VMM.
  
• HVM: Hardware-Assisted Virtual Machine.
  
• Hyperjacker: Hypervisor hijacking.
  
• Hypervisor: See VMM.
  
• Malware: Malicious software. A stealthy rootkit in this context.
  
• Rootkit: A set/kit of tools/executibles with root access (highest privilege).
  
• TLB: Translation Look-aside Buffer.
  
• VME: Virtual Machine Emulators e.g, "Blue Pill", "Vitriol".
  
• VMM: Virtual Machine Monitor e.g., VMWare, Xen.