Re: [Xen-devel] [RFC PATCH 0/18] Xenstore stub domain

[Tim Deegan <tim@xxxxxxx>]

At 11:33 +0100 on 12 Jan (1326367997), Joanna Rutkowska wrote:
> Daniel,
> 
> Can you explain what is the rationale for moving the xenstored into a
> stubdom? After all, if an attacker is able to compromise the xenstored,
> there should be many ways now how to compromise other VMs in the system?
> And it shouldn't matter whether the xenstored is in stubdom or whether
> in Dom0. E.g. the attacker might redirect the block fronts to us some
> false block backends, so that the VMs get compromised fs. One could
> probably think of other attacks as well...?

I think the point is to protect xenstore from dom0, not dom0 from
xenstore.  With stub-xenstore and driver domains, only the domain
builder and PCIback need to have any privilege, and they can be moved
out of dom0 too (e.g., http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1346278 ,
http://tjd.phlegethon.org/words/sosp11-xoar.html)

Tim.


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