Re: [Qemu-devel] Have any ideas about how to detect whether a program is running inside QEMU?

[Daniel Serpell]

Hi!

El Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 03:18:14PM +0800, James Lau escribio:
> My program is a utility for internet payment. It takes an important role in
> the payment process to ensure security.  One of the key functions is that
> the program should detect which machine is paying. So while virtual machine
> (like QEMU) is present, it can cheat the program.
> Checking the hard disk model, cpu type, and other hardward informations
> makes little sense.  Because the users or the hackers can easily modify
> these informations. So I need a QEMU internal checking method that hackers
> can't easily bypass.
> 

Well, as others have argued, this is probably worthless.

But there is a way to detect virtual machines under x86, see
http://invisiblethings.org/papers/redpill.html

But if you run qemu without direct instruction copying, it won't
work (and qemu will run slower), because qemu will correctly
emulate the unprivileged instructions.

        Daniel.