A Technique for Remote Detection of Certain Virtual Machine Monitors

Christopher Jämthagen, Martin Hell, Ben Smeets

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingBook chapterResearchpeer-review

Abstract

The ability to detect a virtualized environment has both malicious and non-malicious uses. This paper reveals a new exploit and technique that can be used to remotely detect VMware Workstation, VMware Player and VirtualBox. The detection based on this technique can be done completely passively in that there is no need to have access to the remote machine and no network connections are initiated by the verifier. Using only information in the IP packet together with information sent in the user-agent string in an HTTP request, it is shown how to detect that the traffic originates from a guest in VMware Workstation, VMware Player or VirtualBox client. The limitation is that NAT has to be turned on and that the host and guest need to run different operating system families, e.g., Windows/Linux.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationTrusted Systems
Subtitle of host publicationThird International Conference, INTRUST 2011, Beijing, China, November 27-29, 2011, Revised Selected Papers
PublisherSpringer
Pages129-137
Volume7222
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-642-32298-3
ISBN (Print)978-3-642-32297-6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2011
EventThe Third International Conference on Trusted Systems, INTRUST 2011 - Beijing
Duration: 2011 Nov 272011 Nov 29

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science
PublisherSpringer
Volume7222
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

ConferenceThe Third International Conference on Trusted Systems, INTRUST 2011
Period2011/11/272011/11/29

Subject classification (UKÄ)

  • Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

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