Systemic threats to hypervisor non‐control data

Hypervisors are becoming a widespread virtualisation layer in current computer systems. Recent successful attacks against hypervisors indicate that they face the similar integrity threats as traditional operating systems. Current approaches that secure hypervisors mainly focus on code or control‐data integrity, without paying attention to non‐control data integrity. In this study the authors construct attacks that target hypervisor non‐control data to demonstrate which types of data within the Xen hypervisor are critical to system security. It shows privilege, resource utilisation and security policy related data are vulnerable to return‐oriented programming or DMA attacks. By modifying their values from one to another, the whole system's performance will be affected. By discussing current approaches that secure hypervisors, which are not suitable for non‐control data, the work is to motivate new innovation in this area to protect them.