| The advent of hypervisors revolutionized the computing industry in terms of malware prevention and detection, secure virtual machine managers, and cloud resilience. However, this has resulted in a disjointed response to handling known threats rather than preventing unknown zero-day threats. This thesis introduces a new paradigm to cloud computing -- utility virtual machines -- that directly leverages virtualization hardware for protection and eliminates often accepted roles of the operating system kernel. This represents a break from prevailing practices and serves to establish a hardware root of trust for system operation. |
