Vmware, Inc.

James S Mattson

David A Dunn

Jeffrey W Sheldon

Radu Rugina

Wei Xu

Alok Nemchand Kataria

Rakesh Agarwal

Mechanisms to protect the integrity of memory of a virtual machine are provided. The mechanisms involve utilizing certain capabilities of the hypervisor underlying the virtual machine to monitor writes to memory pages of the virtual machine. A guest integrity driver communicates with the hypervisor to request such functionality. Additional protections are provided for protecting the guest integrity driver and associated data, as well as for preventing use of these mechanisms by malicious software. These additional protections include an elevated execution mode, termed 'integrity mode,' which can only be entered from a specified entry point, as well as protections on the memory pages that store the guest integrity driver and associated data.

Techniques for protecting memory pages of a virtual computing instance

Guest memory data structures are read by one or more read operations which are set up to handle page faults and general protection faults generated during the read in various ways. If such a fault occurs while performing the one or more read operations, the fault is handled and the one or more read operation is terminated. The fault is handled by either dropping the fault and reporting an error instead of the fault, by dropping the fault and invoking an error handler that is set up prior to performing the read operations, or by forwarding the fault to a fault handler that is setup prior to performing the read operations. If no fault occurs, the read operations complete successfully. Thus, under normal circumstances, no fault is incurred in a read operation on guest memory data structures.

Hypervisor techniques for performing non-faulting reads in virtual machines

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

James S Mattson