Blue Pill (software)
proof-of-concept virtual machine-based rootkit
Blue Pill is the codename for a rootkit based on x86 virtualization. Blue Pill originally required AMD-V (Pacifica) virtualization support, but was later ported to support Intel VT-x (Vanderpool) as well. It was designed by Joanna Rutkowska and originally demonstrated at the Black Hat Briefings on August 3, 2006, with a reference implementation for the Microsoft Windows Vista kernel.
The name is a reference to the red pill and blue pill concept from the 1999 film The Matrix.
Overview
The Blue Pill concept is to trap a running instance of the operating system by starting a thin hypervisor and virtualizing the rest of the machine under it. The previous operating system would still maintain its existing references to all devices and files, but nearly anything, including hardware interrupts, requests for data and even the system time could be intercepted (and a fake response sent) by the hypervisor. The original concept of Blue Pill was published by another researcher at IEEE Oakland in May 2006, under the name VMBR (virtual-machine based rootkit).
Rutkowska claims that, since any detection program could be fooled by the hypervisor, such a system could be "100% undetectable". Since AMD virtualization is seamless by design, a virtualized guest is not supposed to be able to query whether it is a guest or not. Therefore, the only way Blue Pill could be detected is if the virtualization implementation were not functioning as specified.
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This entry incorporates text from “Blue Pill (software)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.