Re: micro-virtualization

I could not agree more. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 22, 2012, at 9:20 PM, David-Sarah Hopwood <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 22/09/12 04:37, Paul E Baclace wrote:
>> Hi, everyone.  I just saw an announcement about the "micro 
>> virtualization" infrastructure from Bromium (founded by Simon Crosby, a 
>> XenSource founder).  It appears to be an effort to encapsulate processes 
>> in a lightweight way without using a vm for each process playpen.  An 
>> overview:
>> 
>> http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/guestbloggers/archive/2012/09/20/guest-blog-from-simon-crosby-explaining-what-bromium-is-and-how-it-works.aspx
> 
> I'm confused. Is this an implemented system that works for isolation of
> tasks within existing Windows applications? What is described doesn't seem
> implementable:
> 
> # By ensuring that each vulnerable or untrustworthy task (eg: opening a
> # web page or an email attachment) is executed in its own micro-VM, Bromium
> # can guarantee that a compromised task cannot access enterprise data or
> # applications.
> #
> # Bromium assumes that at some point a task in a micro-VM will be attacked
> # and will be compromised. The granular isolation afforded by the Microvisor,
> # together with the resource control policies, ensures that any attack will
> # be confined to the micro-VM, that no enterprise data will be stolen, and
> # that the attack will be automatically discarded.
> 
> If tasks are at the granularity of opening a particular web page or
> email attachment, that seems as though it would require either completely
> new web browsers, email clients, etc., or drastic rearchitecture of existing
> ones. Existing apps assume shared memory within a process, so there's no
> way to provide isolation between, say, the code that is opening an email
> attachment and the code that has access to the rest of the user's email
> and contacts, without breaking the app.
> 
> This isn't affected by whether you have hardware virtualization support or
> not. You *might* be able to reduce reliance on the host OS's security
> mechanisms by using hardware virtualization, but I'm skeptical (the hardest
> problem isn't implementing isolation; it is providing enough sharing, and
> only the required sharing, for software to be able to work).
> 
> -- 
> David-Sarah Hopwood ⚥
> 
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