Gray Hat Hacking: The Ethical Hacker's Handbook, Sixth Edition, 6th Edition

CHAPTER 23

Hypervisors 101

In this chapter, we cover the following topics:

•   Theoretical model of virtualizable architectures

•   x86 virtualization

•   Paravirtualization

•   Hardware assisted virtualization

Virtualization is the process of creating multiple, isolated, virtual environments where OSs (guests) can concurrently execute in a physical machine (host). During the last few years, interest in this technology has increased because of the benefits it provides in the reduction of operational costs. However, this sharing of physical resources comes with new security risks. For example, an attacker with access to one of the virtual environments could exploit a flaw in the virtualization stack and compromise the host, granting access ...