Joanna Rutkowska
More info
- Born
- 1981, Warsaw
- Founded
- Invisible Things Lab, Qubes OS
- Known for
- Blue Pill, Evil Maid, Qubes OS
Polish security researcher who showed how a hypervisor could be the perfect rootkit — then built an operating system on the premise that nothing can be trusted.
At Black Hat 2006 Rutkowska presented Blue Pill: a rootkit that used AMD's new hardware virtualization to slide the running operating system into a virtual machine beneath a thin hypervisor, on the fly and without a reboot. Whether it was truly undetectable became a long and fairly loud argument. In 2009 she and Alexander Tereshkin coined the Evil Maid attack, against disk encryption on a laptop left alone in a hotel room.
Her conclusion was that computers can't be secured by plugging holes one at a time. Qubes OS, released in 2012 and built on Xen, instead splits everything into isolated virtual machines: one for banking, one for work, one for whatever you don't trust. Security through distrust, made systematic.