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conference paper

The Design and Implementation of a Virtual Firmware Monitor

Castes, Charly  
•
Costa, François
•
Kalani, Neelu S.  
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October 12, 2025
Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
ACM SIGOPS 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

Low level software is often granted high privilege, yet this need not be the case. Although vendor firmware plays a critical role in the operation and management of the machine, most of its functionality does not require unfettered access to security critical software and data. In this paper we demonstrate that vendor firmware can be safely and efficiently deprivileged, decoupling its functionality from isolation enforcement. We introduce a new class of systems, called virtual firmware monitors, that run unmodified vendor firmware in userspace through software-based virtualization of the highest privilege mode of the application CPU. We describe the implementation of Miralis, a RISC-V virtual firmware monitor, and develop three security policies to protect the OS, enclaves, and confidential VMs from malicious firmware. We verify key components of Miralis, such as instruction emulation and memory protection, through exhaustive symbolic execution. Finally, we demonstrate that Miralis can effectively virtualize unmodified vendor firmware for two hardware platforms with no performance degradation compared to native execution.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3731569.3764826
Author(s)
Castes, Charly  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Costa, François
Kalani, Neelu S.  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Roscoe, Timothy
Foster, Nate
Bourgeat, Thomas  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Bugnion, Edouard  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Date Issued

2025-10-12

Publisher

ACM

Publisher place

New York, NY, USA

Published in
Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
ISBN of the book

979-8-4007-1870-0

Start page

85

End page

100

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DCSL  
VCA  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
ACM SIGOPS 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles

SOSP '25

Seoul, Republic of Korea

2025-10-13 - 2025-10-16

FunderFunding(s)Grant NumberGrant URL

Office of Naval Research

N68335-22-C-0411

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

W912CG-23-C-0032

Available on Infoscience
October 8, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/254794
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