The last Virtualization Security Podcast covered PCI, Kurt Roemer and Jeff Elliot who were guests represented PCI. PCI as you hopefully know is working on compliance guidance for payment systems running within virtual machines and the cloud. This early discussion is a plea for people to get involved in reviewing the currently developing white-paper. While …
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There has been quite a bit of discussion between myself, Tim Pierson, and other with respect to SSL man-in-the-middle attack possibilities within the virtual environment. But what are the chances that such an attack will happen, or that someone would know how to perform the attack? What does the attack depend upon?
Over the past year or so I have been thinking pretty heavily about the direction networking is taking within virtualization. In some ways, it appears security has been forgotten or relegated to ‘encrypt’ and forget. However, it takes quite a bit of knowledge and time to properly set up the backbone of an ‘encrypt’ and forget approach to network security, so it does not happen. Instead, we have a proliferation of technologies being used to cut down on cable clutter and thereby consolidate the network. These are all very important concepts. Security practitioners like myself realize that this type of consolidation WILL happen. So what tools are required to either ‘encrypt and forget’ or to protect these consolidated networks?
There has been great debate of what comprises the cloud, how to bound the cloud so that its easier to understand, and how to secure the cloud. Christofer Hoff of the Rational Survivabilty blog has been spear-heading quite a bit of discussion on cloud taxonomy in his attempts to wrap some thoughts around how to properly secure the cloud and everything within it. The start of this journey is the act of defining exactly what the cloud is, and is not. NIST’s document adds some more to an existing definition by defining public and private clouds.
Intrusion Protection Systems (IPS) differ quite a bit from Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). An IPS is designed to modify some form of security setting when an intrusion is detected, thereby preventing the intrusion from being successful. An IDS on the other hand is just the detection component used by an IPS. Like all security tools used within a virtual environment there are four major ways to implement such devices. We will discuss later some best practices for managing a security tool. We will look at what is currently shipping over products hinted at for the future such as the OpenVSwitch, Xen Instropection API.
I was upgrading my nodes from VMware VI3 to VMware vSphere and used the VMware Update Manager to perform the update. Given that my existing filesystems were implemented to meet the requirements of the DISA STIG for ESX, as well as availability. I was surprised to find that when the upgrade of the first node of my cluster completed, that the install did NOT take into account my existing file system structure, but instead imposed the default file system used by the standard VMware vSphere ESX 4 installation.
