Re: RE: how an hacker can bypass a chrooted environement ?

[john.fellers () gmail com]

I have read some articles about this in the past. Here is an excerpt from one of those:

VMware has its own "backdoor" port, to communicate between internal (emulated) and exernal (emulating) code. There are 
some functions, which allows you (under emulation) to enable/disable different virtual devices, send internal messages, 
and do other things. Here is how these functions are called (you should use exception handling for this code):

        mov     ecx, 0Ah        ; CX=function# (0Ah=get_version)
        mov     eax, 'VMXh'     ; EAX=magic
        mov     dx, 'VX'        ; DX=magic
        in      eax, dx         ; specially processed io cmd
                                ; output: EAX/EBX/ECX = data
        cmp     ebx, 'VMXh'     ; also eax/ecx modified (maybe vmw/os ver?)
        je      under_VMware

VMware registry keys are

  HKLM\Software\VMware, Inc.\VMware for Windows NT -- real
  HKLM\Software\VMWare, Inc.\VMware Tools\ -- virtual

VMware executables directory is

  C:\Program Files\VMware -- both real and virtual

There can be many different methods to detect if you're under virtual OS, such as incorrectly emulated ports, 
predetermined hardware info, special drivers and other things.

I have not tried this, but the capability exists. It would not be hard to write a detection mechanism to test if you 
are in a virtual OS and write routines and functions to essentially "break out" of the virtual environment. You would 
simply have to know where the virtual OS is hooking into the actual operating system and bypass those.

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