Towards Hypervisor Support for Enhancing the Performance of Virtual Machine Introspection

Virtual machine introspection (VMI) is the process of external monitoring of virtual machines. Previous work has demonstrated that VMI can contribute to the security of cloud environments and distributed systems, as it enables, for example, stealthy intrusion detection. One of the biggest challenges for applying VMI in production environments is the performance overhead that certain tracing operations impose on the monitored virtual machine. In this paper, we show how this performance overhead can be significantly minimized by incorporating minor extensions for VMI operations into the hypervisor. In a proof-of-concept implementation, we demonstrate that the pre-processing of VMI events in the Xen hypervisor reduces the monitoring overhead for the use case of VMI-based process-bound monitoring by a factor of 18.