Posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Virtualization Has a Security Blind Spot
Information Week
Virtualization software, primarily the hypervisor, is no different than any other software application: It’s bound to have defects and security bugs. What sets hypervisors apart is the risk of so-called “hyperjacking,” a successful attack that leads to a compromised hypervisor, giving an attacker unfettered access to all virtual machines on the physical server. This could be quite the compromise, given that anywhere from a handful to dozens of VMs could be running on a single
“Virtualization security has nothing to do with the security of the hypervisor,” says Andreas Antonopoulos, an analyst at Nemertes Research. “It has to do with the fact that we’re fundamentally changing the IT architecture, operational patterns, deployment life cycles, and management methods of our servers. These issues will create more security issues for organizations than the hypervisor itself.”
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