Virtual PC Secure Environments

What is a Virtual PC? Quite simply, Windows 9x/Me/XP, Windows Vista, and Linux/Unix Distributions of all flavors, are installed and run inside a "Virtual Hosting Platform", or "Container", which allows multiple Operating Systems to communicate and work with all hardware and peripherals' stationed outside of the "Container" without compromising the Host Operating System or the User's Workstation OS security.

With a Virtual Hosting Platform you can host multiples of different Operating Systems on one computer, each one being contained in it's own secure virtual hosting space. In order to run a Virtual Hosting Platform, you need at least one Operating System installed to act as the Host Operating System for the Virtual Hosting Platform, and the virtual hosting software is then installed as an application. Once the Virtual Hosting Platform software is installed as an application to the primary Hosting OS, all other Operating Systems are installed "inside" the Virtual Hosting Platform Software or "Container".

The main drawback to all Virtual Hosting Software is it has to run as an application under at least one host OS installed on any PC. The host OS is usually a minimal installation, with very few user applications installed, except for the Virtual Hosting Platform. The second drawback is any other User Workstation OS must be installed within the Virtual Hosting Platform. In other words, you need to install a minimum of two OS's. The first OS will host the Virtual Hosting software and the second OS installed is the one you will use as your primary User Workstation OS, with all of your Office applications and data installed under it.

What is needed to make the Virtual PC a success for security purposes and the home user, or in the marketplace, is Virtual Hosting software which can be installed directly onto a PC without the need for a hosting OS.

Software Virtualization or Virtual PC's.

See the latest version of Microsoft's Virtual PC software

Other popular Virtual Hosting Platforms are VMware for PC's and Parallels for MAC

Hardware Virtualization:

Virtual PC's can be implemented at the hardware layer, usually in the processor. This is known as hardware virtualization. There is some suggestion that future operating systems of all sorts (Linux, Mac, Windows, etc.) may be able to use hardware virtualization to indirectly enforce greater security upon the operating system's "kernel" by preventing it from being modified as a means for thwarting dangerous "root kit" style exploits.

The idea is that our future operating systems would always be running inside a virtual machine under the watchful eye of an OS "hypervisor." This has not been practical before now, without hardware support for virtualization, because virtualization required too much real-time involvement of software which introduced an unacceptable amount of overhead and slowed everything down. Hardware virtualization means that virtual machines - and even the entire operating system running inside a virtual machine container - would be able to run at 100% full speed, thus making a persistent security-oriented OS "hypervisor" practical for the first time.

But don't hope for this to ever help with the security of 32-bit Windows platforms. Due to the amount of kernel modification already being done by benign kernel drivers in 32-bit versions of Windows, "hypervisor kernel locking" could only ever be implemented under 64-bit versions of Windows where kernel modification has always been actively prohibited. And due to serious compatibility problems inherent in 64-bit systems, it's also not at all clear (at the start of 2007) how quickly, or even whether, 64-bit Windows will become practical on the desktop.

However, the other current and real security-related application for hardware virtualization is for running your own virtual machines - at 100% full speed - on top of your host operating system. This is possible today with commercial and completely free software from Microsoft, VMware and Parallels. This has an indirect, though strongly positive, impact upon security since possibly unsafe activities such as Internet surfing or peer-to-peer file sharing can be 100% contained within the virtual environment to make online activities much safer.

This can still be done, of course, without hardware virtualization support, but the virtual machine environment as well as the hosting operating system will be running at substantially less than full speed. 

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