From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1Mik8e-0006eb-GD for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:20:16 -0400 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1Mik8Z-0006eP-8u for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:20:15 -0400 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (port=51745 helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1Mik8Z-0006eM-3m for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:20:11 -0400 Received: from mx20.gnu.org ([199.232.41.8]:9692) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS-1.0:RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1Mik8Y-0007oG-KK for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:20:10 -0400 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]) by mx20.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1Mik8X-0002xK-8r for qemu-devel@nongnu.org; Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:20:09 -0400 Message-ID: <4A9E178D.90804@redhat.com> Date: Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:58:21 +0200 From: Paolo Bonzini MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <20090831180825.6ed2ea55@bud-laptop> In-Reply-To: <20090831180825.6ed2ea55@bud-laptop> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: [Qemu-devel] Re: QEMU as a "virtual smart card"? List-Id: qemu-devel.nongnu.org List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , To: "Bud P. Bruegger" Cc: qemu-devel@nongnu.org, John Forrester > At least looking naively at QEMU, it seems that its CPU and RAM are > well protected from the host operating system--in a way to say make it > practically impossible for some malware to extract the secret key used > in a virtual machine. I don't understand: the host operating system, by definition, can see everything. A privileged process (i.e. running as root) can always look at /dev/mem and read info about QEMU's CPU and RAM. > We are also interested in the isolation of input devices, in > particularly the keyboard as to prevent PIN sniffing. My "naive" > impression is that key logging for a PS/2 keyboard is probably more > difficult than with a USB keyboard. Is there any thruth to my > misconception? If you mean by cracking the keyboard itself, USB keyboards have a firmware while PS/2 keyboards have only some glue logic, so I'd tend to agree. For PS/2 you would need physical access to the cable, after which all hopes are off anyway. For software attacks (i.e. in the OS) I don't think there is any difference. > * Is there any way of getting exclusive access to an USB pen drive > from a virtual machine, preventing the host operating system to say take > an image of the content? Again, not if the attacker can run privileged processes on the host. Paolo