Presentation Title Breaking Virtualization by Any Means
Presentation Abstract
In the last 5 years, virtualization software have been massively adopted by companies as a mean to reduce costs, achieve instant scalability, and possibly better their security through isolation. Recent numbers indicate that 78 percent of companies have their production servers virtualized, and 20 percent of them actually only rely on virtualized servers. In a nutshell, virtualization has become a major risk for most companies worldwide.
At the same time, security auditing of such software poses unique challenges. Since virtualization software simulates a physical machine, the attack surface is untypical. The complexity of the software and its low level system inner workings emulation also make them particularly critical from a security point of view.
We propose a few methodologies to assess virtual machine software, including ioports fuzzing, ioctl() enumeration, switching the cpu to 8086 mode or pci fuzzing and will uncover the underlying thinking about attacking virtualization software. Not all of those techniques are new, but all of them have proved to find bugs in virtualization software and will be demoed on the virtualization softwares of the market.
About Jonathan Brossard
Jonathan is a security research engineer based in France specialised in low level (reverse) engineering and vulnerability finding. He has previously disclosed bugs in some of the most complex and obscure software, such as Microsoft Bitlocker, BIOS Firmwares and disk encryption softwares, or as mainstream as Adobe Reader, or popular anti viruses. He is a frequent speaker at some of the best security conferences including HITB (Amsterdam), Hackito Ergo Sum (Paris) or Defcon (Las Vegas).
Attached to information sharing, he is also a member of the French hacker space /tmp/lab where he animates security events. He is also the co organiser of the Hackito Ergo Sum conference in Paris, and enjoys giving security trainings or proper university classes.
After past experiences in the Defense industry and as a Research Engineer in India, Jonathan is now sharing his time between a few projects including Toucan System, a French startup he founded and where he is CEO, and P1 Code Security he also co-funded where he follows research activities on bug discovery.