Re: [Qemu-devel] QEMU as a "virtual smart card"?

[Laurent Vivier]

Le lundi 31 août 2009 à 18:08 +0200, Bud P. Bruegger a écrit :
> Hello everyone,
> 
> we are thinking of a possibly "exotic" use of QEMU and would like to
> ask your advice on whether we are going in the right direction.
> 
> We are pondering of how to use a virtual machine to have some security
> features normally associated with hard tokens such as smart cards.  
> 
> In particular, one of the key concepts of smart cards is that they can
> store secret keys that never leave the device but can only be used by a
> trusted and protected internal CPU for encryption/signing.  
> 
> At least looking naively at QEMU, it seems that its CPU and RAM are
> well protected from the host operating system--in a way to say make it
> practically impossible for some malware to extract the secret key used
> in a virtual machine.  
> 
> Is this a valid conception of what QEMU does?  How good is the
> isolation of a virtual machine from the host operating system.  
> 
> We are also interested in the isolation of input devices, in
> particularly the keyboard as to prevent PIN sniffing.  My "naive"
> impression is that key logging for a PS/2 keyboard is probably more
> difficult than with a USB keyboard.  Is there any thruth to my
> misconception?
> 
> Finally one last question questions:
> 
> * Is there any way of getting exclusive access to an USB pen drive
> from a virtual machine, preventing the host operating system to say take
> an image of the content?
> 
> many thanks in advance for any input and illuminations!

In fact, you want to do that: http://www.myglobull.com/ ?

Regards,
Laurent
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