Virtual Machine Introspection: Techniques and Applications

Abstract

Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI) is a technique that enables monitoring virtual machines at the hypervisor layer. This monitoring concept has gained recently a considerable focus in computer security research due to its complete but semantic less visibility on virtual machines activities and isolation from them. VMI works range from addressing the semantic gap problem to leveraging explored VMI techniques in order to provide novel hypervisor-based services that belong to different fields. This paper aims to survey and classify existing VMI techniques and their applications.