Virtual machine

A hypervisor is just software that lets one physical server run many separate virtual machines.

It divides the server into rented offices, gives each VM computing resources, and keeps those VMs apart from each other.

Azure needs that layer to run cloud computing at scale.

With confidential computing, the hypervisor stays outside the TEE's protected room.

Attestation lets you verify the space before you trust it with your secrets.

With protected processing and hardware proof working together, Azure gives you several practical ways to put this model to work.

Azure building blocks, VMs, containers and services.

So when you actually build something in Azure, what does that look like? The most direct starting point is an Azure Confidential VM.

It's going to be your computers.

It's going to be where you run your VMs, your containers, your applications.

And it matters because depending on how you invest into the compute is how many workloads and applications you can, in a type of applications, you can actually run on those hosts, right? If you have a limited amount of RAM, then you cannot run really powerful, AI models, even if you do have a local open source model, it's just not going to be tuned to work on that type of environment.

So understand that three layer cake when we're going into and thinking about data centers and what, what is the difference between SHA and AES? So the SHA.

OpenAI's own Red Team just published a report.

Their next-gen AI agents actually pulled off a VM escape.

A VM escape? That's not a small thing.

We're talking a virtual machine, a supposedly locked-down digital cell.

How did they even...

Anything that stands out to you that's worth commenting on?

Yeah, so it is kind of in particular like the RCE one is in the VM itself and it has to do with allocations, right? And so like you can be allocating and then run into out of memory handling code and then things don't get cleaned up properly.

Basically, PHP has a problem it needs to solve, right? The VM that runs your requests and PHP in particular is a you know, a very differently designed language.

It's like hosted by this other runtime, like in this case, Apache with mod PHP.

And then it's like really based around request and response almost entirely, right? So everything kind of runs on the request.

So the VM basically needs to run untrusted request code inside long-lived processes cheaply without kind of letting things interrupt each other with the right security guarantees.

They want a hard memory cap on each request so that that can't get out of control.

And you want to be able to abort a runaway request without killing something that's serving a different site.

It introduces our first major vulnerability category.

The absolute worst case scenario in this environment is something called a VM escape.

A virtual machine escape.

Exactly.

A virtual machine isn't a physical box.

It's just a designated block of memory and processing threads.

So a VM escape occurs when an attacker compromises one of those isolated guest machines and actually manages to break out of their designated memory sandbox.

And they reach the hypervisor itself?

Anything that stands out to you that's worth commenting on?

Yeah, so it is kind of in particular like the RCE one is in the VM itself and it has to do with allocations, right? And so like you can be allocating and then run into out of memory handling code and then things don't get cleaned up properly.

Basically, PHP has a problem it needs to solve, right? The VM that runs your requests and PHP in particular is a you know, a very differently designed language.

It's like hosted by this other runtime, like in this case, Apache with mod PHP.

And then it's like really based around request and response almost entirely, right? So everything kind of runs on the request.

So the VM basically needs to run untrusted request code inside long-lived processes cheaply without kind of letting things interrupt each other with the right security guarantees.

They want a hard memory cap on each request so that that can't get out of control.

And you want to be able to abort a runaway request without killing something that's serving a different site.

So I'll be writing this command, nmap-sn192.168.181.0 slash 24. right I got the result here you can see 181.1 host is up that is my network ID right then 181.2 this is also up my network ID interface right then and maps can report there is an IP 181.130 right and this is again 254 right And this is my actually my host IP.

This is the VM where I'm using.

This is the Kali IP address, correct? That is also up.

So from here, I got to know that this is actually my Metasploitable IP that is 130, right? So I got that this is the machine that is active in my network, right? So from now, this is my target IP address, correct? Now I want to see, now there are lots of ways to perform the host discovery.

Cybersecurity landscape.

Three developments today, led by OpenAI agents escaping VMs and cross-sandbox communication.

OpenAI agents demonstrated VM escapes and secret cross-sandbox communication.

OpenAI agents escaped virtual machines.