System Programming Lab

The next public class is May 15 - 18 at OffensiveCon (Berlin, Germany - In-person)

Hypervisor Development for the Intel and UEFI Platform

Overview

This course provides students the skills and knowledge to develop their thin hypervisors as UEFI modules using Intel VT-x. This is a hands-on heavy class and will spend about half of the time with excesses.

Audiences

This class is geared towards software developers, security researchers and others with an interest in expanding knowledge of Intel VT-x, the x86_64 system architecture, and/or UEFI.

Levels

Prerequisites

Required:

Recommended pre-class learning materials will be introduced about prior to the class.

Learning Objectives

At the end of the class, students will gain enough knowledge and skills to start developing their pass-through UEFI-based hypervisors. Knowledge-wise, this includes but not limited to the understanding of:

Outlines

  1. UEFI and Hypervisors
    • Lectures: why UEFI for hypervisors, differences from OS kernel drivers, EDK2, introduction to high-level design options
    • Lab: setting up the lab environment
    • Lab: debugging firmware modules and logging output
  2. Basics of VT-x
    • Lectures: processor modes, VMCS, “host” vs “guest”, VM-exit, VM-entry, and snapshot and “guest” for fuzzing hypervisor
    • Lab: setting up Bochs and debugging VMX instruction issues
    • Lab: configuring host and guest
    • Lab: starting host and guest, monitoring CPUID execution
  3. OS Boot
    • Lectures: system boot phases, boot time vs runtime, physical vs virtual mode, and runtime drivers for monitoring OS activities
    • Lab: controlling VM-exits with MSR bitmaps
    • Lab: booting Windows by building host page tables, IDT and GDT
    • Lab: tracing guest page faults with exception interception and event injection
  4. Extended Page Tables (EPT)
    • Lectures: x64 address translation, EPT setup and activation, EPT induced VM-exits, memory types, caches, VPID, EPT-based hooking, VT-d (DMA remapping), and snapshot-based fuzzing hypervisor design
    • Lab: reviewing address translation mechanisms with and without EPT
    • Lab: enabling EPT and tracing guest execution
  5. Multi-processors Support
    • Lectures: multi-processor protocol, processor activity state, application processors startup, unrestricted guest and Hypervisor Top Level Functional Specification (TLFS)
    • Lab: virtualizing all processors
    • Lab: booting multi-processor Windows by emulating INIT-SIPI-SIPI
  6. Control Register Shadowing
    • Lectures: control register guest/host mask, read shadow, effects, and emulation of control register changes
    • Lab: “owning” control registers
    • Lab: booting Ubuntu by properly emulating MOV-to-CRx
  7. Demos and References
    • Hardware debuggers (DCI), single board computers, and relevant open source projects

Contents may change in a way that does not impact the learning objectives.

Details

A hypervisor is a critical component in both security and cloud computing. There is also an increasing interest in applying virtualization technologies in the area of security engineering and analysis. How can hypervisors be used to secure the existing systems? How to write custom hypervisors to perform reverse engineering and fuzzing more efficiently?

In this class, the students will learn the foundations to answer those questions, that is, the basic skills and knowledge to develop hypervisors. The class is designed in a way such that everything is built from scratch and optimized for learning. This allows students to better understand the building blocks and expand the knowledge acquired in the course by themselves afterward. Topics include UEFI architecture and programming, VT-x/EPT configuration, debugging tools, comparison of hypervisor designs, application of the technologies, and more.

This is a hands-on-oriented class. We believe that the students can learn and retain concepts and skills the best by working with those concepts by themselves and not by being taught; hence gaining the greatest value. With this philosophy, the class is designed for lab activities as the primary learning opportunities, and lectures are to explain backgrounds and the motivations for those. We will spend about half of the time for hands-on.

At the beginning of the class, students will receive skeleton implementations of our hypervisors and incrementally update them through the exercises with a clear understanding of motivations and design choices.

At the end of the class, students will also receive a full version of our hypervisor. This includes implementation of advanced concepts, such as stealth-hooking hypercall, use of VT-d, guest hardening (like HyperGuard if you are familiar with it), host hardening through CET, SMAP, UMIP, etc, handling of uncommon events like microcode update, NMI, and so on. This version can be used to complement your understanding of advanced topics and as a reference to explore more topics as you wish.

Additionally, a proof-of-concept implementation of taking and reverting to snapshots for fast full-system fuzzing will be shared as well.

Hypervisor_Development_on_Intel_and_UEFI_Platform.png

Pricing

Type Individual Company
Early Bird 2400 USD 3600 USD
Standard 2700 USD 4000 USD

All prices are per seat.

Format and Package

Format:

Package:

Hardware and Software Requirements

The students are expected to have the following hardware and software:

The newer versions of the operating systems and other software are supported. Another Linux distro may be workable but unsupported. Other hypervisors such as KVM, Hyper-V, or VirtualBox cannot be used.

The host system can also be a cloud-provided machine if the host machine cannot be arranged locally. Those are confirmed to be usable:

The students are expected to complete the setup instructions that will be sent by the instructor before the class.

Registration and Contacts