Podcast Episode 177

Release Date: July 24, 2008


VMsafe is an interface allowing security vendors to protect virtual machines without having to install agents inside each guest operating system.

While security products like antivirus will still have to install inside a dedicated VM, they will be able to monitor what's happening inside other virtual machines from a completely new perspective: the hypervisor level.

This will allow checking which traffic is entering or leaving a VM, or even which data is being executed inside it (looking at CPU states, memory pages and OS processes list). All done in a transparent way.

When you think about it, this revolutionary approach has two remarkable benefits: first of all it saves precious physical resources and management efforts without duplicating the same security agent inside each guest OS, secondarily it prevents the security agents from being directly attacked and possibly disabled.