Archive for 'Virtualization' Category
VMware Workstation 6 released
The latest edition of VMware Workstation is finally out of beta and available for download. Once again, VMware allows existing users of Workstation 5 to upgrade for a hundred bucks U.S. In addition to the usual incremental improvements and official support for an even greater number of guest operating systems (including Windows Vista as both [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Fuzzing virtual machines
Security researcher Tavis Ormandy has published an interesting paper “An Empirical Study into the Security Exposure to Hosts of Hostile Virtualized Environments” (PDF link) where he used a I/O fuzzer and random opcode generator to find anomalies in VMware and other virtualization products. Tested were VMware Workstation and VMware Server, Xen, QEMU, Bochs, plus two [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Attacks on Virtual Machines
More reading on the security of virtual machines like VMware: a researcher at Symantec has released a great little paper Attacks on Virtual Machine Emulators (hat tip to Computer Defense for point it out). The paper covers a few of the recent VM-specific malware like the SubVirt rootkit (PDF) but mostly concentrates on methods of [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Security of virtualization
Over at Info World, Tom Yager has a few thoughts on the security of virtualization. I touched on the topic back in April in Can virtualization be trusted for security?. Among other things, he has an interesting idea that an attacker might take advantage of easier cloning and failover possible with virtual machines. I can [...]
Read the rest of this entry...Can virtualization be trusted for security?
Some of our clients have started using VMWare, Xen and MS Virtual Server to provide either a contained environment for accessing the Internet from the desktop, or to isolate Internet services such as web and e-mail servers from the rest of a physical server. The idea is that if the virtual machine gets infected with [...]
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