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From: | Paolo Bonzini |
Subject: | [Qemu-devel] Re: QEMU as a "virtual smart card"? |
Date: | Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:58:21 +0200 |
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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.
I don't understand: the host operating system, by definition, can see everything. A privileged process (i.e. running as root) can always look at /dev/mem and read info about QEMU's CPU and RAM.
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?
If you mean by cracking the keyboard itself, USB keyboards have a firmware while PS/2 keyboards have only some glue logic, so I'd tend to agree. For PS/2 you would need physical access to the cable, after which all hopes are off anyway. For software attacks (i.e. in the OS) I don't think there is any difference.
* 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?
Again, not if the attacker can run privileged processes on the host. Paolo
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