HyperSafe: A Lightweight Approach to Provide Lifetime Hypervisor Control-Flow Integrity

Virtualization is being widely adopted in today's computing systems. Its unique security advantages in isolating and introspecting commodity OSes as Virtual Machines (VMs) have enabled a wide spectrum of applications. However, a common, fundamental assumption is the presence of a trustworthy hypervisor. Unfortunately, the large code base of commodity hypervisors and recent successful hypervisor attacks (e.g., VM escape) seriously question the validity of this assumption. In this paper, the authors present HyperSafe, a lightweight approach that endows existing Type-I bare-metal hypervisors with a unique self-protection capability to provide lifetime control-flow integrity.