Exploiting Virtual File Formats for Fun and Profit

Abstract

Virtual file formats describe entities of virtualization such as virtual machines or virtual hard drives. As virtualization technologies are part of almost every IT environment, all entities contributing to these technologies bare the potential to contain vulnerabilities – either in a technical or design way. In order to elaborate a new class of attacks in Cloud environments which is based on virtual file formats, this paper describes characteristics of these formats, analyzes potential attack vectors and describes found vulnerabilities. The impact of these vulnerabilities allows the access to the hypervisor from within a virtual guest system – the worst case of any threat modeling in virtual environments. This impact will also be used to illustrate how traditional trust and security models have to be adjusted in order to address the architectural changes introduced by Cloud environments.