67 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
67 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
MiniVisor
|
|
==========
|
|
|
|
[](https://www.codacy.com?utm_source=github.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=tandasat/MiniVisorPkg&utm_campaign=Badge_Grade)
|
|
|
|
This is a research hypervisor written as a UEFI and Windows driver for the educational purpose for Intel processors.
|
|
|
|
This MiniVisor, as a UEFI driver, provides the ability to inspect system activities even before the operating system boots, while as a Windows driver, allows developers to debug it with familiar tools like WinDbg.
|
|
|
|
Showcase
|
|
---------
|
|
|
|
* Loading the hypervisor from the UEFI shell.
|
|
|
|
|
|
* Logging boot activities and interacting with the guest.
|
|
|
|
|
|
* Booting Ubuntu on a bare-metal.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Motivation
|
|
-----------
|
|
|
|
The goal of this project is to share an additional learning resource for writing UEFI hypervisors with the community and researchers.
|
|
|
|
There are numerous open source hypervisors with small and easy-to-study implementations, but those that support booting operating systems as UEFI drivers are still not many.
|
|
|
|
Given the universality of UEFI systems on the AMD64 ecosystem and the unique ability to monitor, attack and protect the system throughout operating system startup on bare-metal systems, the authors believe that having the understanding and being able to develop this type of hypervisors are valuable for research.
|
|
|
|
System Requirements
|
|
--------------------
|
|
|
|
Common Requirements:
|
|
* Intel VT-x and EPT supported processors
|
|
|
|
Requirements for the UEFI driver:
|
|
* UEFI-based system
|
|
* 64bit Windows 10, IoT Core, or Ubuntu to boot
|
|
|
|
Requirements for the Windows driver:
|
|
* 64bit Windows 7 and 10
|
|
|
|
See [Building and Debugging](Docs/Building_and_Debugging.md) for testing.
|
|
|
|
Advantages and Use Cases
|
|
-------------------------
|
|
|
|
While this project does not implement or designed for any immediately useful features, UEFI-based hypervisors have multiple advantages over Windows driver-based ones and can implement unique features.
|
|
|
|
* No need of disabling Hyper-V (Virtualization Based Security) to run the custom hypervisor
|
|
* No need of enabling the test-signing mode
|
|
* Zero direct indicator of existence of the hypervisor from operating system perspective
|
|
* Installing hooks during the early boot phase and letting PatchGuard to protect them
|
|
* Detecting bootkit and early system modification
|
|
* Implementing operating system agnostic solutions
|
|
|
|
Acknowledgments
|
|
----------------
|
|
|
|
The authors thank for creators and maintainers of the following projects:
|
|
* [Bareflank](https://github.com/Bareflank/hypervisor) and [STM](https://github.comjyao1/STM) -- for publishing UEFI-base hypervisors with the relatively small codebase.
|
|
* [zpp_hypervisor](https://github.com/eyalz800/zpp_hypervisor) -- for making me realize that writing UEFI-based hypervisors is viable.
|
|
* [EfiGuard](https://github.com/Mattiwatti/EfiGuard) -- for clean codebase and rich documentation for UEFI development newbies.
|
|
* [hvpp](https://github.com/wbenny/hvpp) -- for few techniques required for the UEFI environment.
|
|
* [ia32-doc](https://github.com/wbenny/ia32-doc) -- for saving me from defining thousands of constants and structures by hand.
|