Virtual Machines or virtualization technology has become very popular in todays computing world. A host of services are being provided on a virtual platform. Hence detecting virtual environment is an important goal for malware attackers and vendors of software services both. In this thesis we study all such attacks, categorize them and observe how Virtual Machine vendors defend against them. Apart from all this we also experiment and find out effectiveness of various categories of attacks on different virtual machine types and hypervisor designs. We also design a software that detects virtualization in user space i.e. without root access/admin rights.
