Instructors:Satoshi Tanda
Dates: May 30- June 2 2022
Location: Hilton Double Tree
Capacity: 20
This course provides students the skills and knowledge to develop their thin hypervisors as UEFI modules using Intel VT-x. This is a hands-on heavy class and will spend about half of the time with excesses.
Hypervisors are becoming more important in cloud computing and security. There is also an increasing interest in using hypervisors in the area of security engineering and analysis. How can hypervisors help protect against tampering of the guest OS or other software? How can it be used in malware analysis?
This course provides students the skills and knowledge to develop their hypervisors using Intel VT-x. Sample code is built from scratch and optimized for learning. This allows students to better understand the building blocks and expand the knowledge acquired in the course by themselves. Topics include UEFI firmware programming, VT-x/EPT configuration, debugging tools and tricks for both VMs and bare-metals, and more.
This is a hands-on-oriented class. The students can learn and retain concepts and skills the best by working with those by themselves and not by being taught; hence gaining the greatest value. With this philosophy, the class is designed for lab activities as the primary learning opportunities, and lectures explain backgrounds for the lab activities.
At the beginning of the class, students will receive skeleton implementations of hypervisors and incrementally update them through the lab activities with a clear understanding of motivations and design choices.
Additionally, students will receive an enhanced version of the hypervisor at the end of the class. This includes handling of uncommon events like microcode update and NMI, more capabilities such as guest virtual memory access and HyperGuard like guest protection, and hardening of itself using CET, SMEP, SMAP, restrictive read-only page tables, and more. This version can be used as a reference to explore more advanced topics after the course.
At the end of the class, students will gain enough knowledge and skills to start developing their thin UEFI-based hypervisors. Knowledge-wise, this includes but not limited to the understanding of:
- Key concepts of VT-x and programming interfaces
- Execution environment changes during OS boot and their influence on the hypervisor design
- Subtle yet critical technologies such as memory types and caches
- Application Processors (APs) start up, and emulation by a hypervisor
- "Owning" control registers and challenges with it
- General UEFI-module development workflow and tools
- The pros and cons of UEFI-based vs OS kernel module-based hypervisors
OUTLINES
This class is geared towards software developers, security researchers and others with an interest in expanding knowledge of Intel VT-x, the x86_64 system architecture, and/or UEFI.
Prerequisites:
Hardware and Software Requirements:
Students will be provided with bootable Linux and UEFI shell USB thumb drives with all tools and materials used in the training.
Satoshi Tanda (@standa_t) is a system software engineer and a security researcher with more than a decade of experience. His experience spans over the areas of UEFI- and Windows kernel-module programming and reverse engineering, vulnerability discovery and exploitation, malware analysis, and teaching them to professionals and school students. He open-sourced multiple hypervisors for security researchers, including type-1 and type-2 hypervisors on Intel and AMD processors. He currently works at CrowdStrike.
Click here to register.