CMPS223 Final Project Virtual Machine Introspection Techniques

This work is a survey of Virtual Machine (VM) introspection, a necessary tool when utilizing VMs for security purposes. In the the rest of this section, we discuss traditional techniques for dealing with malware and the appeals of using a VM in a security context. In Section 2, we outline the main problem for using VMs for security called the semantic gap. In Section 3, we analyze 3 related approaches to VM introspection and focus on their advantages and limitations. In Section 4 we show how to leverage existing tools to implement a small rootkit detector.