The widespread adoption of cloud computing resources has resulted in the proliferation of virtualization technologies.New technology begets new attack vectors; consequently, a new breed of malware techniques have emerged that detect the presence of a virtual machine or hypervisor and respond by directly attacking the hypervisor in an attempt to breakout of the virtual machine container. To counter this emerging threat, Siege Technologies proposes to research novel hypervisor based security primitives and extend its existing small footprint, cross-platform hypervisor with advanced security capabilities to protect OS kernels and nested inner hypervisors.Advanced hypervisor based defenses will help ensure trustworthy computation on virtualized systems despite the growing threat to virtualization technologies. Sieges hypervisor maintains a small footprint by offloading the complexities of VM management, physical device sharing and virtual device emulation to the native operating system or traditional inner hypervisor (e.g. VMWare, Xen, KVM).This design allows the Siege hypervisor to reduce its complexity, decrease its own software attack surface, and most importantly, specialize in supporting research and design into radical new security and forensics mechanisms.
