Attacking Hypervisors Using Firmware and Hardware

Explore the attack surface of modern hypervisors from the perspective of system firmware and hardware emulation vulnerabilities in this Black Hat conference talk. Delve into new attacks on hypervisors based on system firmware vulnerabilities, with impacts ranging from VMM DoS to hypervisor privilege escalation to SMM privilege escalation from within virtual machines. Discover how a firmware rootkit could expose secrets within virtual machines and learn how firmware issues can be used for analysis of hypervisor-protected content. Gain insights into new modules in the open source CHIPSEC framework for testing hypervisor security issues when virtualizing hardware.