Virtualization Security

Securing virtual environments for VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft hypervisors Virtualization changes the playing field when it comes to security. There are new attack vectors, new operational patterns and complexity, and changes in IT architecture and deployment life cycles. What's more, the technologies, best practices, and strategies used for securing physical environments do not provide sufficient protection for virtual environments. This book includes step-by-step configurations for the security controls that come with the three leading hypervisor--VMware vSphere and ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008, and Citrix XenServer. Includes strategy for securely implementing network policies and integrating virtual networks into the existing physical infrastructure Discusses vSphere and Hyper-V native virtual switches as well as the Cisco Nexus 1000v and Open vSwitch switches Offers effective practices for securing virtual machines without creating additional operational overhead for administrators Contains methods for integrating virtualization into existing workflows and creating new policies and processes for change and configuration management so that virtualization can help make these critical operations processes more effective This must-have resource offers tips and tricks for improving disaster recovery and business continuity, security-specific scripts, and examples of how Virtual Desktop Infrastructure benefits security.

One of the biggest buzzwords in the IT industry for the past few years, virtualization has matured into a practical requirement for many best-practice business scenarios, becoming an invaluable tool for security professionals at companies of every size. In addition to saving time and other resources, virtualization affords unprecedented means for intrusion and malware detection, prevention, recovery, and analysis. Taking a practical approach in a growing market underserved by books, this hands-on title is the first to combine in one place the most important and sought-after uses of virtualization for enhanced security, including sandboxing, disaster recovery and high availability, forensic analysis, and honeypotting. Already gaining buzz and traction in actual usage at an impressive rate, Gartner research indicates that virtualization will be the most significant trend in IT infrastructure and operations over the next four years. A recent report by IT research firm IDC predicts the virtualization services market will grow from $5.5 billion in 2006 to $11.7 billion in 2011. With this growth in adoption, becoming increasingly common even for small and midsize businesses, security is becoming a much more serious concern, both in terms of how to secure virtualization and how virtualization can serve critical security objectives. Titles exist and are on the way to fill the need for securing virtualization, but security professionals do not yet have a book outlining the many security applications of virtualization that will become increasingly important in their job requirements. This book is the first to fill that need, covering tactics such as isolating a virtual environment on the desktop for application testing, creating virtualized storage solutions for immediate disaster recovery and high availability across a network, migrating physical systems to virtual systems for analysis, and creating complete virtual systems to entice hackers and expose potential threats to actual production systems. About the Technologies A sandbox is an isolated environment created to run and test applications that might be a security risk. Recovering a compromised system is as easy as restarting the virtual machine to revert to the point before failure. Employing virtualization on actual production systems, rather than just test environments, yields similar benefits for disaster recovery and high availability. While traditional disaster recovery methods require time-consuming reinstallation of the operating system and applications before restoring data, backing up to a virtual machine makes the recovery process much easier, faster, and efficient. The virtual machine can be restored to same physical machine or an entirely different machine if the original machine has experienced irreparable hardware failure. Decreased downtime translates into higher availability of the system and increased productivity in the enterprise. Virtualization has been used for years in the field of forensic analysis, but new tools, techniques, and automation capabilities are making it an increasingly important tool. By means of virtualization, an investigator can create an exact working copy of a physical computer on another machine, including hidden or encrypted partitions, without altering any data, allowing complete access for analysis. The investigator can also take a live ?snapshot? to review or freeze the target computer at any point in time, before an attacker has a chance to cover his tracks or inflict further damage.

The purpose of SP 800-125 is to discuss the security concerns associated with full virtualization technologies for server and desktop virtualization, and to provide recommendations for addressing these concerns. Full virtualization technologies run one or more operating systems and their applications on top of virtual hardware. Full virtualization is used for operational efficiency, such as in cloud computing, and for allowing users to run applications for multiple operating systems on a single computer.

Complete Hands-On Help for Securing VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure by Edward Haletky, Author of the Best Selling Book on VMware, VMware ESX Server in the Enterprise As VMware has become increasingly ubiquitous in the enterprise, IT professionals have become increasingly concerned about securing it. Now, for the first time, leading VMware expert Edward Haletky brings together comprehensive guidance for identifying and mitigating virtualization-related security threats on all VMware platforms, including the new cloud computing platform, vSphere. This book reflects the same hands-on approach that made Haletky’s VMware ESX Server in the Enterprise so popular with working professionals. Haletky doesn’t just reveal where you might be vulnerable; he tells you exactly what to do and how to reconfigure your infrastructure to address the problem. VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security begins by reviewing basic server vulnerabilities and explaining how security differs on VMware virtual servers and related products. Next, Haletky drills deep into the key components of a VMware installation, identifying both real and theoretical exploits, and introducing effective countermeasures. Coverage includes • Viewing virtualization from the attacker’s perspective, and understanding the new security problems it can introduce • Discovering which security threats the vmkernel does (and doesn’t) address • Learning how VMsafe enables third-party security tools to access the vmkernel API • Understanding the security implications of VMI, paravirtualization, and VMware Tools • Securing virtualized storage: authentication, disk encryption, virtual storage networks, isolation, and more • Protecting clustered virtual environments that use VMware High Availability, Dynamic Resource Scheduling, Fault Tolerance, vMotion, and Storage vMotion • Securing the deployment and management of virtual machines across the network • Mitigating risks associated with backup, performance management, and other day-to-day operations • Using multiple security zones and other advanced virtual network techniques • Securing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) • Auditing virtual infrastructure, and conducting forensic investigations after a possible breach informit.com/ph | www.Astroarch.com

The software and networking industry is experiencing a rapid development and deployment of Network Functions Visualization (NFV) technology, in both enterprise and cloud data center networks. One of the primary reasons for this technological trend is that NFV has the capability to reduce CAPEX and OPEX, whilst increasing networking service efficiency, performance, agility, scalability, and resource utilization. Despite such well-recognized benefits, security remains a major concern of network service providers and seriously impedes the further expansion of NFV. This book is therefore dedicated to investigating and exploring the potential security issues of NFV. It contains three major elements: a thorough overview of the NFV framework and architecture, a comprehensive threat analysis aiming to establish a layer-specific threat taxonomy for NFV enabled networking services, and a series of comparative studies of security best practices in traditional networking scenarios and in NFV, ultimately leading to a set of recommendations on security countermeasures in NFV. This book is primarily intended for engineers, engineering students and researchers and those with an interest in the field of networks and telecommunications (architectures, protocols, services) in general, and particularly software-defined network (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV)-based security services. Extensively studies security issues in NFV Presents a basis or guideline for both academia researchers and industry practitioners to work together to achieve secure and dependable lifecycle management of NFV based network services

The goal of this book is to describe new concepts for Internet next generation. This architecture is based on virtual networking using Cloud and datacenters facilities. Main problems concern 1) the placement of virtual resources for opening a new network on the fly, and 2) the urbanisation of virtual resource implemented on physical network equipment. This architecture deals with mechanisms capable of controlling automatically the placement of all virtual resources within the physical network. In this book, we describe how to create and delete virtual networks on the fly. Indeed, the system is able to create any new network with any kind of resource (e.g., virtual switch, virtual routers, virtual LSRs, virtual optical path, virtual firewall, virtual SIP-based servers, virtual devices, virtual servers, virtual access points, and so on). We will show how this architecture is compatible with new advances in SDN (Software Defined Networking), new high-speed transport protocol like TRILL (Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links) and LISP (Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol), NGN, IMS, Wi-Fi new generation, and 4G/5G networks. Finally, we introduce the Cloud of security and the virtualisation of secure elements (smartcard) that should definitely transform how to secure the Internet.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th IFIP TC 8 International Conference, CISIM 2013, held in Cracow, Poland, in September 2013. The 44 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from over 60 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on biometric and biomedical applications; pattern recognition and image processing; various aspects of computer security, networking, algorithms, and industrial applications. The book also contains full papers of a keynote speech and the invited talk.

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject Computer Science - IT-Security, grade: 1,3, Technical University of Munich (Department of Informatics), course: Seminar Securing the Linux Kernel - Features and Attack Vectors, language: English, abstract: Hardware virtualization is the core concept behind the huge success of cloud computing in the last years. Effective isolation among different virtual machines running on the same host is promised, as well as isolation from the operating system that might be present on the host itself. These barriers are necessary, as cloud computing may create a situation where both provider and customer do not trust each other: The provider wants to keep full control over their expensive server hardware and the customer may want to process sensitive data inside their virtual machine that neither the provider nor other customers are allowed to see. As such, there are several attacker models to be considered in this context, both customers and hosting providers wanting to take control over other virtual machines or the physical server itself. In this paper, we consider attacks for each of the attacker models, as well as possible mitigations. In the end, we will find that while preventing VM escapes only really depends on having secure hypervisor implementations, efforts to protect the VM from the host itself are still rather flawed.