James Morris' presentation is referring to this published
demonstration
of exploiting Xen a few years ago
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/497376
http://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/misc08/xenfb-adventures-10.pdf
The key difference sVirt makes is at chapter 3.4 in the
paper.
In Xen world, there was a single SELinux domain (xend_t)
that covered
XenD and all the QEMU processes. Since all VMs & XenD
ran as the same
context, any exploited QEMU process in Xen, could access
any other
guest disks, as well as any host disks.
In the KVM + sVirt world, every QEMU process is separated
by a dedicated
MCS category on its SELinux context. The disks assigned to
a guest are
labelled with the same MCS category. This means that an
exploited QEMU
can only access disks which were explicitly assigned to it,
and cannot
access the host disk devices. This prevents the step in
that paper
where they overwrite various key files in the host OS root
filesystem
Regards,
Daniel
Cool!
Is there any well documented KVM exploit that can be reproduced without too much trouble,
assuming SELinux (sVirt) is turned off? Then I can demonostrate the effect of sVirt by
turning it on.
Thank you very much.
Shi