Skip to main content

Virtualization: Are VMs any less secure than PMs?



Saw this on Dark Reading:

And VMWare's desktop Ace software lets you lock down virtual machines, even when they are moved around. Lin says it works like a network access control (NAC) for virtual machines.

Thomas Ptacek, a security researcher with Matasano Security, says the move to virtualization is the biggest thing happening in IT today. "And every application running in a modern IT organization is on a path to being moved to one big iron [machine] running multiple VMs," he says. "And its impact on security touches everything."


What I find great about Virtualization phenomena is that besides addressing the issues (security, provisioning, consolidation, flexibility), things finally will happen to the IT industry where a lot has been left undone.

Overall a good article, a bit of marketing pitch for Blue Lane (I thought there was Reflex VSA as well, among many others) but never mind.

Dark Reading's article and Matasano's take on it.

I am just glad that the long forgotten security issue will be addressed adequately thanks to Virtualization! All vulnerable OSs will eventually be secure like they ought to be!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Security: VMware Workstation 6 vulnerability

vulnerable software: VMware Workstation 6.0 for Windows, possible some other VMware products as well type of vulnerability: DoS, potential privilege escalation I found a vulnerability in VMware Workstation 6.0 which allows an unprivileged user in the host OS to crash the system and potentially run arbitrary code with kernel privileges. The issue is in the vmstor-60 driver, which is supposed to mount VMware images within the host OS. When sending the IOCTL code FsSetVoleInformation with subcode FsSetFileInformation with a large buffer and underreporting its size to at max 1024 bytes, it will underrun and potentially execute arbitrary code. Security focus

Splunk that!

Saw this advert on Slashdot and went on to look for it and found the tour pretty neat to look at. Check out the demo too! So why would I need it? WHY NOT? I'd say. As an organization grows , new services, new data comes by, new logs start accumulating on the servers and it becomes increasingly difficult to look at all those logs, leave alone that you'd have time to read them and who cares about analysis as the time to look for those log files already makes your day, isn't it? Well a solution like this is a cool option to have your sysadmins/operators look at ONE PLACE and thus you don't have your administrators lurking around in your physical servers and *accidentally* messing up things there. Go ahead and give it a shot by downloading it and testing it. I'll give it a shot myself! Ok so I went ahead and installed it. Do this... [root@tarrydev Software]# ./splunk-Server-1.0.1-linux-installer.bin to install and this (if you screw up) [root@tarrydev Software]# /op

Virtualization is hot and sexy!

If this does not convince you to virtualize, believe me, nothing will :-) As you will hear these gorgeous women mention VMware, Akkori, Pano Logic, Microsoft and VKernel. They forgot to mention rackspace ;-) virtualization girl video I'm convinced, aren't you? Check out their site as well!