Taming Hosted Hypervisors With (Mostly) Deprivileged Execution
Recent years have witnessed increased adoption of hosted hypervisors in virtualized computer systems. By non-intrusively extending commodity OSs, hosted hypervisors can effectively take advantage of a variety of mature and stable features as well as the existing broad user base of commodity OSs. However, virtualizing a computer system is still a rather complex task. As a result, existing hosted hypervisors typically have a large code base (e.g., 33.6K SLOC for KVM), which inevitably introduces exploitable software bugs. Unfortunately, any compromised hosted hypervisor can immediately jeopardize the host system and subsequently affect all running guests in the same physical machine.