title : Top Ten Recommendations for Securing Virtual Servers

4

Topic: Top Ten Recommendations for Securing Virtual Servers

Top Ten Recommendations for Securing Virtual Servers

Importance of using cloud services for business benefits or competitive advantage is not new today. However, since a business is aimed at continuous growth, scalability becomes a prime concern of the process. Cloud has offered this solution for scalability. Virtualization is all about ensuring effective functions through scalable, cost-effective and secure platforms. But like in any innovation or adaptation of new technology, virtualization poses several threats to an organizational information system too. The key concern for any virtual ambience is its security threats. Several categories of threats can be identified along with several locus of their concentration. In my project, I would like to find out the top ten recommendations to combat vulnerabilities in virtualization along with their impact on the information system and business as a whole.

In Details

Most common virtualization threats pertain to hyperjacking, guesthopping, VM sprawling and similar attacks which are mainly caused due to misconfiguration and access vulnerability. Since virtualization helps entities to merge systems easily while scaling up services, the policies and procedures for secure virtualization in each adoption is often neglected. Such loopholes also lead to the vulnerabilities. On the other hand, the huge scope of extending servers in virtual system has also become a matter of concern regarding vulnerability in virtualization environment. “These challenges range from the usage scenario with other objects and dedicated servers which act as a middleman among various networks such as internet and wireless sensor network” (Pandey et. al, 2019).

The above mentioned issues can be resolved to great extent through procedures like system and host hardening, strict access restriction based on privileged and common users’ access, hardening and securing virtual machines etc. Host hardening plays a crucial role in protecting virtual systems as most of the virtual attacks are caused due to unauthorized host access. Hypervisors are the primary elements that need to be controlled in this regard. “However, due to the dynamic and distributed nature of cloud and vulnerabilities existing in the current implementations of virtualization, several security threats and attacks have been reported” (Patil, Dudej & Modi, 2019). This statement suggests accountability to be one of the major indicator for virtual security. This is required while transforming systems for the purposes of scaling or changing dynamics of services. Hypervisors, delegated administrators and self services are generally relied upon for this purpose.

Further security measures include protection of virtual machine files, auditing, patch updates, adoption of VLANs, isolating VMs, proliferation management etc. “Virtualization enables provision of resources to users according to their requirement through Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) delivery model in cloud computing environment” (Borisaniya & Patel, 2019). This factor leads to the necessity of encryption, segmentation of networks to avoid proliferation and threats. Understandably, securing virtual systems is not a one-time task and needs to be continued with each change in volume and performance of the virtual servers and machines.

Conclusion

The reason behind selection of this topic for my project is to offer a potential framework for securing virtual machine in the best possible way. Considering the growth of virtual services, security has become a major concern for all size and kind of business.

References

Borisaniya, B., & Patel, D. (2019). Towards virtual machine introspection based security framework for cloud. Sādhanā, 44(2). doi: 10.1007/s12046-018-1016-6

Karadsheh, L. (2012). Applying security policies and service level agreement to IaaS service model to enhance security and transition. Computers & Security, 31(3), 315-326. doi: 10.1016/j.cose.2012.01.003

Pandey, S., Rakesh, N., Yadav, A., & Tripathi, A. (2019). Protecting Composite IoT Server by Secure Secret Key Exchange for Xen Intra Virtual Machines. International Journal Of Information And Computer Security, 11(1), 1. doi: 10.1504/ijics.2019.10020102

Patil, R., Dudeja, H., & Modi, C. (2019). Designing an efficient security framework for detecting intrusions in virtual network of cloud computing. Computers & Security, 85, 402-422. doi: 10.1016/j.cose.2019.05.016