Open Source Summit + ELC Europe 2018

Is it safe to use QEMU to do X? This talk explains the security model and use cases that QEMU is designed for.  Understanding the security model is critical for deploying virtual machines as well as contributing code to QEMU. This talk gives an overview of the attack surfaces, including emulated devices, the monitor, remote desktop, disk images, and the CPU accelerators.  Virtual machines offer isolation from each other and the host if QEMU is configured properly. Most of these best practices are encapsulated in libvirt, but not all users choose to use it, so it is worth understanding them. Finally, no discussion of security in QEMU would be complete without reviewing CVEs and the lessons learnt from them.