Does streaming a game from a dedicated gaming VM still expose my PCs to significant privacy/security concerns from installed games?

Question

So the plan is to make a Windows 10 guest, give it lots of vCPUs and memory, perform GPU passthrough to achieve maximal performance, and then load my games onto this guest. The aim of this would be to stream the games over LAN to my PCs, thus providing easy access while also putting all games on a single box that has no personal files on it.

As games can include tracking or other invasive anti-cheat as well as vulnerabilities like any software, I feel that they should be placed on an unprivileged system. However, the most secure method of using a restricted VLAN that has dedicated clients for said gaming (with ACLs blocking any of those devices from talking to anything else in the building) would be rather annoying in terms of convenience and resources.

As such, my question boils down to if the plan proposed in paragraph 1 is sufficient or if streaming of a gaming server still opens the entire network to considerable risk (as there's always some risk).

The reason for the specificity of this question is that games are a unique threat model for me, as they are not critical by any means but at the same time do not clearly need to be as isolated as traditional DMZ devices (e.g. webservers).

Answer 1

The most obvious inroad: The passthrough GPU has full access to main memory for DMA operations, mediated by the IOMMU, and to other PCIe devices in the same domain.

The GPU can emit "translated" memory access requests that bypass the IOMMU translation (as the addresses used are already assumed to be translated), whether that is actually implemented in existing GPUs is something I don't know straight away.

Whether the IOMMU still performs access control checks for translated requests depends on the chipset, but my expectation would be "no", as the point of having address translation inside PCIe devices instead of the IOMMU is to distribute the TLB -- performing access checks would reintroduce the same bottleneck that virtualization awareness in PCIe devices was built to avoid.

Depending on your chipset, it may be possible to disallow "translated" PCIe requests entirely, then at least the GPU would be limited to memory allocated to the VM, but access to other devices remains open.

These scenarios require determined attackers though. Unless you are specifically targeted, I'd expect that the isolation is sufficient to protect your system against the typical invasive software, because while VM breakout is possible for invasive software, actually doing something with this access requires analysis of the outside system.

The biggest threat here would likely be ransomware, but the effort/reward balance for ransomware that sophisticated is not on the side of attackers.

The thing I would expect from anti-cheat software though is that it attempts to detect virtualized environments, and flag them as untrustworthy straight away.

Hiding virtualization completely is difficult, and this is likely to become your biggest problem in this endeavor.