Re: [Qemu-devel] Design Decision for KVM based anti rootkit

[David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>]

On 16.06.2018 13:49, Ahmed Soliman wrote:
> Following up on these threads:
> - https://marc.info/?l=kvm&m=151929803301378&w=2
> - http://www.openwall.com/lists/kernel-hardening/2018/02/22/18
> 
> I lost the original emails so I couldn't reply to them, and also sorry
> for being late, it was the end of semester exams.
> 
> I was adviced on #qemu and #kernelnewbies IRCs to ask here as it will
> help having better insights.
> 
> To wrap things up, the basic design will be a method for communication
> between host and guest is guest can request certain pages to be read
> only, and then host will force them to be read-only by guest until
> next guest reboot, then it will impossible for guest OS to have them
> as RW again. The choice of which pages to be set as read only is the
> guest's. So this way mixed pages can still be mixed with R/W content
> even if holds kernel code.
> 
> I was planning to use KVM as my hypervisor, until I found out that KVM
> can't do that on its own so one will need a custom virtio driver to do
> this kind of guest-host communication/coordination, I am still
> sticking to KVM, and have no plans to do this for Xen at least for
> now, this means that in order to get it to work there must be a QEMU
> support our specific driver we are planning to write in order for
> things to work properly.
> 
> The question is is this the right approach? or is there a simpler way
> to achieve this goal?
> 

Especially if you want to support multiple architectures in the long
term, virtio is the way to go.

Design an architecture independent and extensible (+configurable)
interface and be happy :) This might of course require some thought.

(and don't worry, implementing a virtio driver is a lot simpler than you
might think)

But be aware that the virtio "hypervisor" side will be handled in QEMU,
so you'll need a proper QEMU->KVM interface to get things running.

-- 

Thanks,

David / dhildenb