Virtualization and Security: Happily Ever After?

Virtualization has been a major enabling technology for improving trustworthiness and tamper-resistance of computer security functions. In the past decade, we have witnessed the development of virtualization-based techniques for attack/malware monitoring, detection, prevention, and profiling. Virtual platforms have been widely adopted for system security experimentation and evaluation, because of their strong isolation, maneuverability, and scalability properties. Conversely, the demand from security research has led to significant advances in virtualization technology itself, for example, in the aspects of virtual machine introspection, check-pointing, and replay. In this talk, I will present an overview of research efforts (including our own) in virtualization-based security and security-driven virtualization. I will also discuss a number of challenges and opportunities in maintaining and elevating the synergies between virtualization and security.