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Wouldn’t this possibility depend on security holes in Virtualbox rather than in the guest OS?

• thecatspaw 12y ago
  It would depend on both.
  • cpach 12y ago
    But if there are security holes in Virtualbox, wouldn’t they be exploitable by any OS, regardless of what language it was written in?
    • tedunangst 12y ago
      Yes. The relevance depends on how likely you are to run a virtualbox image you found on the Internet because somebody told you "run this image".
  • cbd1984 12y ago
    The idea of a VM is that it provides an iron box which nothing can break out of, because it's completely invisible. There's nothing a guest can do which could possibly distinguish a VM session from running on the bare hardware. Partly this is for compatibility, partly for ease of development (develop the next VM as a guest in the current VM!), and partly for simple security: You can't escape a prison if you are utterly convinced you're already out. Maybe that part of the theory never made it into practice.
    • tedunangst 12y ago
      Yeah. Welcome to practice: I type "ifconfig | grep vio" and if it comes back nonblank, I know I'm running in virtualbox.
      • cbd1984 12y ago
        OK. Is anyone working on x86 VMs which do try to be completely invisible to guests?
        • zaroth 12y ago
          That was probably abandoned because it was not performant.
    • cbd1984 12y ago
      The idea of a VM is that it provides an iron box which nothing can break out of, because it's completely invisible. There's nothing a guest can do which could possibly distinguish a VM session from running on the bare hardware. Partly this is for compatibility, partly for ease of development (develop the next VM as a guest in the current VM!), and partly for simple security: You can't escape a prison if you are utterly convinced you're already out. Maybe that part of the theory never made it into practice.