RSSVirtualization's Secret Security Threats
Hear what the U.S. National Security Agency thinks about the pros and cons of virtualization, inside and outside its IT department.
A related concern is the hypervisor, the root layer that manages the VMs. If compromised, it could expose everything on the system. But McDowell is least worried about this scenario: "Hypervisors are very hard to write, and there are just three of them: Xen, Microsoft, and VMware," so there's not broad expertise for hackers to tap into, he said.
Leapfrog Effect
Citrix's Roemer noted that the NSA's risk examples are on the extreme side. "They're onto something there, but a lot of their needs greatly exceed that of other organizations, he said.The NSA's Simard agreed, but noted that there's a leapfrog effect, in which the NSA and other government agencies sometimes are the first to come across a threat, and feed that experience to commercial companies to help them improve their products. The commercial companies take the issue a step further and end up having better options than the government, which then pushes the envelope in its usage and discovers new issues.
He sees this being very true in the virtualization world, where the feds were the first to see the technology as a security aid and then, more recently, as a new potential threat vector. "Hopefully, industry will learn from our worries," Simard said.
© IDG 2009
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