&gt; I really find it hard to believe that security is really wonderfully provided for in a unikernel<p>I think you&#x27;ve missed the point: The hypervisor provides security. The unikernel does not. Everything in the same unikernel guest is in the same security domain, meaning everything in the same unikernel guest trusts everything else in that unikernel.<p>The hypervisor is the correct level to provide security because that&#x27;s all it does. It exists to securely multiplex hardware, to allow multiple unikernel guests to run on the computer at the same time without having to be aware of each other. The hypervisor is, ideally, invisible, in that its only &quot;API&quot; is intercepting hardware access attempts and doing its magic at that point; it provides no abstractions of any kind, so it can be as simple as possible. You can&#x27;t hit what you can&#x27;t see, and you can&#x27;t exploit code which isn&#x27;t there.<p>The hypervisor of course uses all of the hardware tricks the CPU provides to provide isolation. Modern virtualization hardware fits the bill just fine here.<p>It&#x27;s therefore <i>possible</i> for unikernels to establish and enforce their own security policy, just like how you can run Linux as a guest under Xen. It&#x27;s just that it shouldn&#x27;t be necessary in a proper hypervisor&#x2F;unikernel setup, because everything running in the same guest should trust each other and only need to worry about information coming in from the outside world.