VM-based security overkill
Sergey Bratus, Michael E. Locasto, Ashwin Ramaswamy, Sean W. Smith · 2010
Virtualization has seen a rebirth for a wide variety of uses; in our field, systems security researchers routinely use it as a standard tool for providing isolation and introspection. Researchers' use of virtual machines has reached a level of orthodoxy that makes it difficult for the collective wisdom to consider alternative approaches to protecting computation. We suggest that many scenarios exist where virtual machines do not provide a suitable tool or appropriate security properties. We analyze the use of virtual machines in the systems security space and we highlight other work that questions the current (ab)uses of virtualization.