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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