HVMI: Security Solutions Thrive on Friendly Hypervisors

This talk was given by Raul Tosa & Daniel Ticle, Bitdefender at the Xen Developer and Design Summit in July 2020. In July, Bitdefender open sourced Hypervisor Memory Introspection (HVMI). This talk provided a preview. 

Security solutions like Hypervisor Memory Introspection (HVMI) require dedicated hypervisor support. One example is the possibility to apply specific memory permissions to certain memory pages, and to be notified when the guest OS tries to violate those permissions. 

During the development of HVMI technology, Bitdefender required a hypervisor that was developed in-house, codenamed Napoca, which could be quickly and easily adapted for HVMI requirements. As a “how-to” hypervisor support model, Raul and Daniel previewed the release of the  source code to the open-source community with the hope that it would serve as inspiration for future HVMI-related functionality in Xen Hypervisor.

Additionally, in this talk, Raul and Daniel highlight absent features to be ported to Xen Hypervisor.

Watch the entire talk here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yy64CHJisY&list=PLYyw7IQjL-zFYmEoZEYswoVuXrHvXAWxj&index=15