4 Responses Sep 18
Vijay Work:
Virtualization and its Vulnerabilities.
Virtualization technology is concept of abstracting and creating a layer on hardware to have multiple virtual instances running on one machine by sharing resources. This concept was brought to make best use of hardware to its max capacity. For personal computer users, if they need to have multiple operating systems for different purposes, they can have multiple operating systems on same machine and toggle between them without even rebooting the system with this virtualization technology. When it comes servers, large system can be broken into multiple small instances and have different operating systems if needed. This helps to utilize system more efficiently and isolate applications by having dedicated instance for each or group of them. Some of the key advantages of virtualization are cost effective operations, solation, fast recovery, variable state.
Security vulnerabilities due to virtualization.
While virtualization has many advantages, it brings security vulnerabilities with it. Attacks on Hypervisor is one of main security vulnerability that virtualization brings. Hypervisor is a software that allows one machine to support multiple virtual machines by sharing resources virtually. Native structure has hypervisor embedded in the machine. This made no security threats to hypervisor. “For native virtualization architecture, there are currently many physical ways to ensure access control to the hypervisor.” (Scarfone, 2011). With virtualization, there could be two types of attacks on hypervisor. One is attacks through operating systema and second one is through guest operating system. Since operating systems comes with some vulnerability, when an attacker gains access to operating system, it means attacker now has control over hypervisor as well. The same thing with attack via guest operating system. If there are multiple virtual machines, you need to secure all of them. This is because when attacker gets access to hypervisor, they now can break into all the virtual machines. “Virtual library checkout is when a checked out VM image becomes infected on another VMM and later readmitted to its original virtual library” (Murphy, 2007).
Migration attack is another security vulnerability with virtualization. When moving physical devices from one place to another there is not security risk via network. Yes, there could be physical damage that could cause data loss or system failure but that is very less likely to happen. When you are moving virtual machines, they are moved over network which makes it easy for migration, but it could lead to giving access to unauthorized users. Also, if there is some malicious code it travels putting other virtual machines in data center under risk.
Denial of service attack is another most common one. This is type of attack where host is flooded with traffic causing maximizing host resource which would now cause unavailability to legit users. It is hard to detect as IP addresses range is large and tough to distinguish between actual and fraud source. Availability of bots for attackers makes it easy for them to perform such attacks. Many security organizations monitor network traffic to identify and block malicious traffic and penetration attempts by adding specialized appliances which are just like another server (Golden, 2012). Vendors now have provided solution to inspect traffic using virtual switches.
Managing and responsibility is big overarching issue with servers. If for physical servers, data center is responsible for maintaining and managing. Since it is virtualized the responsibility is left open. Patching and maintaining must be done regularly to avoid security risks. Overall, virtualization has become more prominent and companies are finding solutions and work arounds to make best use of virtualization.
References
· Alan Murphy, "Security Implications of the Virtualized Datacenter", 2007 http://www.f5.com/pdf/white-papers/virtual-data-center-security-wp.pdf.
· Karen Scarfone, Murugiah Souppaya, Paul Hoffma, "Guide to Security for Full Virtualization Technologies", 2011 http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-125/SP800-125-final.pdf.
· Golden, B. (2012, March 7). 3 key issues for secure virtualization. Retrieved from https://www.csoonline.com/article/2131147/3-key-issues-for-secure-virtualization.html.
Raja Work:
Virtualization is the main component of cloud computing that abstract detail of physical hardware and provides isolation among hardware, operating system, and applications. Virtualization gives several benefits rather than traditional systems. “Virtualization makes to run multiple operating systems simultaneously; operating system application and hardware are isolated, VMs are also isolated, and improves resource utilization with cost-effective. Virtualization supports cloud computing to virtualize the resources to provide software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, and platform-as-a-service mainly” (Gupta, Srivastava, & Chauhan, 2016).
Virtualization in cloud computing has many benefits and it has an abstract detail of physical hardware and provides isolation among hardware, operating systems, and applications. Virtualization gives several benefits when compared to traditional systems. Virtualization helps in running multiple operating systems simultaneously; operating system application and hardware are isolated, Virtual Machines (VM’s) are isolated which in turn improves resource utilization and cost-effectiveness. Virtualizations can make many instances in a single physical machine and these instances are called Virtual Machines (VM) and VM can be migrated from one physical machine to another physical machine.
There are three basic categories of virtualization such as storage virtualization, network virtualization, and server virtualization which helps in different ways such as one for melding physical storage from multiple network storage devices, another for combining computing resources in a network by splitting the available bandwidth, another which hides the physical nature of server resources (Sierra-Arriaga, Branco, & Lee, 2020).
There are many security vulnerabilities with virtualization and the establishment of a security system in virtual machines is not easy. Virtualization gives the permissions to create copy, to share, and to migrate the Virtual machines as VM’s are isolated for cloud users. For Cloud Service Providers (CSP’s) multi-tenancy makes it harder to enforce uniform security controls and countermeasures for all the clients. Isolation of VMs, data, and network communication related to different clients is a key measure against multi tenancy-related concerns. Some of the Virtualization vulnerabilities are VM Escape, VM Hopping, VM Theft, VM Sprawl, Insecure VM migration, Sniffing and spoofing (Gupta, Srivastava, & Chauhan, 2016).
The adoption of virtualization has created a new set of security considerations which might create its own security vulnerabilities such as “(i) new forms of malware that target virtualization have appeared and, since they operate with a higher level of privilege than the operating system (OS), they cannot be suppressed by traditional techniques like antivirus software (ii) Most virtualization solutions have at least one important software component—the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM), which can be affected by software bugs that lead to security vulnerabilities (iii) Some of the traditional security strategies for stand-alone systems are weakened or rendered useless when virtualization is introduced. Traditional security strategies may work under assumptions that are not necessarily true for virtualized systems” (Sierra-Arriaga, Branco, & Lee, 2020).
Virtualization is not inherently secure or insecure. “Adding virtualization to a platform can make the task of securing it more challenging. Virtualization of the I/O functions and device redirection add to the existing complexity of the system and increase its attack surface” (Ray & Schultz, 2009).
References:
Gupta, M., Srivastava, D. K., & Chauhan, D. S. (2016). Security Challenges of Virtualization in Cloud Computing. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Competitive Strategies - ICTCS '16. DOI:10.1145/2905055.2905315
Ray, E., & Schultz, E. (2009). Virtualization security. Proceedings of the 5th Annual Workshop on Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Challenges and Strategies - CSIIRW '09. DOI:10.1145/1558607.1558655
Sierra-Arriaga, F., Branco, R., & Lee, B. (2020). Security Issues and Challenges for Virtualization Technologies. ACM Computing Surveys, 53(2), 1-37. DOI:10.1145/3382190