Bugtraq mailing list archives
RE: VMWare poor guest isolation design
From: Arthur Corliss <corliss () digitalmages com>
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:45:23 -0800 (AKDT)
On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Ken Kousky wrote:
This may be far off course but with all the discussions of VMWare as a safe sandbox that has broad security value it seems we have to pay attention to the assumptions. IF the virtual machine is operating properly, it can provide a level of sandboxing and restrict session privileges for that instance of the machine. However, the most common exploit in software continues to be memory leakages or buffer overflows. It seems to me that the code that can be injected through the most common attack vector (buffer overflows) executes with full privileges of the real hosting machine, there would be little benefit to the virtualization. Am I missing something here? Is there a way that the arbitrary code injected through a buffer overflow can be constrained in the logical machine? It seems to me the VM can't provide this protection???
VMs can do just that, isolate the damage to the vm, with no impact to the host. This discussion never addressed that, though, it was focused on the premise that vms should be protected from the host operating system, which is exceedingly impractical. The host was never in danger from the techniques discussed here. I think you may be referring to sandboxes like chroot & jails which are not quite as effective at isolating processes as the vm route. They have a hell of a lot less overhead, though. --Arthur Corliss Live Free or Die
Current thread:
- Re: VMWare poor guest isolation design, (continued)
- Re: VMWare poor guest isolation design Jonathan Yu (Aug 24)
- More on VMWare poor guest isolation design M. Burnett (Aug 25)
- Re: More on VMWare poor guest isolation design Tim Newsham (Aug 27)
- RE: More on VMWare poor guest isolation design M. Burnett (Aug 27)
- RE: More on VMWare poor guest isolation design Tim Newsham (Aug 30)
- RE: More on VMWare poor guest isolation design Arthur Corliss (Aug 30)
- Re: More on VMWare poor guest isolation design Wietse Venema (Aug 27)
- Re: VMWare poor guest isolation design Arthur Corliss (Aug 24)
- RE: VMWare poor guest isolation design Arthur Corliss (Aug 25)
- RE: VMWare poor guest isolation design Ken Kousky (Aug 27)
- RE: VMWare poor guest isolation design Arthur Corliss (Aug 30)