[jchw]

Actually, I believe it's true. It's not that detecting Bochs is necessarily hard, it's just that it's probably not on most people's radars. I had similar success evading anti-VM detection by just simply using Qemu (without KVM) instead of VMware a while ago. (Long enough ago that I still used VMware, I suppose.)

If there were an anti-VM cat-and-mouse game with Qemu/Bochs/etc. that evolved beyond primitive string searches and the like, CPU emulation would likely do a lot better against anti-VM technology. I suspect this is the same thing that makes Unicorn Engine and Qiling fairly effective for analyzing obfuscated code.