Securing virtual machine monitors
Paul A. Karger · 2009
It is widely believed that the use of a virtual machine monitor (VMM) is at least as secure, if not more secure than separate systems. A recent Information Week survey [6] reports that 55% of responding business technology professionals believe that a system running in a virtual machine is as safe as physical servers and 20% believe it safer than physical servers. Such views are certainly encouraged by recent papers, such as [2] and [10]. Madnick and Donovan [9] first proposed VMMs for security in 1973 by pointing out that "since virtual machine monitors tend to be shorter, simpler, and easier to debug than conventional multiprogramming operating systems, the VMM is less error-prone."