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Can Bochs VM help to avoid spectre and meltdown types of att

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romankqsok
Posts: 22
Joined: 2019-01-06 15:04

Can Bochs VM help to avoid spectre and meltdown types of att

#1 Post by romankqsok »

Can bochs full emulation prevent escaping from guest to host using spectre like vulnerabilities?

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GarryRicketson
Posts: 5644
Joined: 2015-01-20 22:16
Location: Durango, Mexico

Re: Can Bochs VM help to avoid spectre and meltdown types of

#2 Post by GarryRicketson »

Can Bochs VM help to avoid spectre and meltdown types of attack
The first hit:https://security.stackexchange.com/ques ... nd-spectre
So yes, the guest OS will be vulnerable to Meltdown and require patching independently of whether the hypervisor has been patched
Based on that, I would say no, Bochs VM can not help to avoid spectre and meltdown types of attack.

romankqsok
Posts: 22
Joined: 2019-01-06 15:04

Re: Can Bochs VM help to avoid spectre and meltdown types of

#3 Post by romankqsok »

Does an ability of a guest to escape into the host address space depend on a type of virtualization?

For example slow full emulation like in Bochs (when original CPU instructions are converted to other instructions before execution) vs fast hardware virtualization (when CPU instructions are executed almost unchanged just in another context) if I understand correctly ?

What about a full emulation of even another architecture? Say fully emulating immune Cortex A53 virtual hardware on a X86 hardware which is not immune to spectre by itself?

Is it so easy to produce a code for a Cortex A53 virtual guest CPU which would be translated into vulnerable hardware X86 host instructions?

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