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Godfather of Xen On Why Virtualization Means Everything
coondoggie writes "While conventional wisdom says virtualized environments and public clouds create massive security headaches, the godfather of Xen, Simon Crosb, says virtualization actually holds a key to better security. Isolation — the ability to restrict what computing goes on in a given context — is a fundamental characteristic of virtualization that can be exploited to improve trustworthiness of processes on a physical system even if other processes have been compromised, he says."
If OSs hadn't failed so bad on isolation, we wouldn't need so much virtualization. "Virtual machine monitors" are just operating systems with a rather simple application API. Microkernels, if you will.
"While conventional wisdom says virtualized environments and public clouds create massive security headaches, the godfather of Xen, Simon Crosb, says virtualization actually holds a key to better security. Isolation — the ability to restrict what computing goes on in a given context — is a fundamental characteristic of virtualization that can be exploited to improve trustworthiness of processes on a physical system even if other processes have been compromised, he says"
Given the track record of the companies in IT, I really doubt his words.
It will probably become mass breaches of security made easy.
>trustworthiness of processes on a physical system even if other processes have been compromised
What.
You can't improve that.
It's zero.
Is the "Godfather of Xen" the guy I need to talk to if I need the Buddha 'removed from this cycle of suffering and reincarnation', so to speak?
And if the current level of virtualization isn't secure enough, adding another virtual layer will certainly improve security even more.
To me the biggest security win with VM's is the ability to properly size a system for what it is actually doing. No more adding "just one more" service to a box because it's got more horsepower than it needs. By doing more logical partitioning of the software you limit the commingling of data, administration, and crash risk between different services.
who will hypervise the hypervisors?
Among other things, I'm responsible for a cluster of windows terminal servers, which users never fail to find creative ways of breaking. Yes, Windows sucks, but it's necessary to run the software my customers use, so there is no alternative. Virtualization may be overkill in theory, but in reality it may be the only way to keep users from hosing our systems. Would be different if MS knew how to properly design an OS, but if wishes were ponies......
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Reason is that money isn't a concern there, reliability is. So you can throw tons of technology at making something work well. There's plenty of stuff that mainframes do that we'd love to see on normal computers. The problem is being able to implement it at an acceptable level of performance and at an acceptable cost.
Godfather of Xen On Why Virtualization Means Everything
Well, HE thinks it means everything because without it meaning everything he is irrelevant.
He also seems to think his OS is different than every other OS that came before it.
Virtualization is just another layer of software to exploit, the real problem is that it allows idiots who may have separated services onto physically separate devices due to incompatibilities with various bits of installed software on the machines, now they are once again back on the same hardware with shared memory ...
Virtual machines are useful for utilizing under utilized hardware for doing trivial things you wouldn't want to waste full hardware for and that are unimportant. ISPs are a great place for virtualization as they let the ISP 'sell a machine' with a lot less effort than would traditionally be required. Using the current 'virtualization' tech for security purposes just shows your ignorant.
Adding more software and bugs does not add security, especially since you're just doing the exact same thing the original OS was supposed to do. So your argument becomes 'I'm better at it than you', and when ever that happens I run the other direction as fast as possible. If you have to tell me you're important, you aren't.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I can't believe that nobody here has mentioned BSD Jails. A spectacular display of the tripe incompetence that slashdot has become.
You guys better go bitch and "Occupy Wallstreet" instead of working and reading.
Aren't VMs more about reiability (availability) and protecting the user from themself?
Its already been alluded to in other comments, but if something stuffs up on a pyewta, sometimes it requires a restart, or if a pyewta is infected by a virus, sometimes it requires a rebuild. Since the whole "cloud" phenomenon is about taking server resources out of small businesses and the like and putting them into big datacenters where they belong, its pretty hard for a user to fix their pyewta if its 1000 miles away or on a different continent. Using VM tools to blow away the broken VM and start a new one seems like a pretty useful feature since it reduces the amount of work for the datacenter and hence manhour costs can be reduced.
Also, from what I've learned VM failover can be (virtually) instantaneous with no loss of sessions or program states (using live migration), which is pretty important given the lack of patience of most computer users nowadays.
Its also pretty hard to make a perfectly secure OS because everybody knows the user is the most untrustworthy element of the system, but they can also be the most ingenious clever buggers, and trying to predict how a user might exploit your server is a futile crysal ball exercise.
In other conferences Microsoft says that Windows Advanced server is the best tool for the job, drug dealers show benefits of increased cocain use and Hitler says that final solution to the Jewish question improves German ecosystem.
Virtualization also leads to resource overbooking. If I run on two physical X5355 Xeons, I know that I have two physical X5355s at my disposal. If I run on two virtual X5355, I can't tell if provider does not use same X5355s for other clients.
The article is a whole load of marketing BS, he obscures the real truth by telling half truth to feed the marketing machine
its all bs
First Fedora guys said Unix is bad -- you bad, bad, bad girl, your file systems are all bad, bad, bad.
Next VM (not the real VM, the Virtual Memory VM, the virtual VM) guy says -- you bad, bad, bad girl your protections are bad, bad, bad (I don't care how I write my programs, though).
Unix is going to cry all day and all night.
We need to go deeper!
"While conventional wisdom says virtualized environments and public clouds create massive security headaches
Huh? Nobody I know understands this to be 'conventional wisdom'. What are they smoking?
the godfather of Xen, Simon Crosb, says virtualization actually holds a key to better security. Isolation
Yeah, we all knew that a decade ago. My simple SOHO office server is in the process of migrating from two linux boxes to one VM server with 8 VM's for role isolation. I'm no visionary or security genius - I did this for clients 3-4 years ago (I had to wait for hardware prices to fall for in-house stuff) when the technology became commodity and performant.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
you want to virtualize a computer, run the program and then check that:
* the computations have not been hampered with
* nobody has been snooping in your computations
This goal is currently out of reach. It is an open problem in computer science if it's even possible!
The exact term is "encrypted computation". Imagine if you could not only encrypt a file, but run it after it's been encrypted! You could send the file to some cloud and run it there, without revealing _what_ is being computed or what data you use. You get the result back and safely decrypt it on your own PC.
Now if someone in the cloud tried to attack your computer program, with a buffer overflow say, or the hardware it ran on was faulty, the encrypted result would be garbage and you wouldn't be able to decrypt it. That's actually great, because it gives you a way to check if the program ran correctly or not. Just like how checksums assure you that a file has been transmitted correctly. If we had this capability, we could run any program on fast, cheap, but error-prone hardware. We could run anything on graphic cards, which make a mistake now and then, overclock CPUs far more than today, or maybe even run faster and cheaper hardware that nobody has yet built, because it would be too error prone.
So what you're saying is that the Godfather of Xen has an offer we can't refuse?
The OS+hypervisor has a larger attack surface than the OS alone, period. Unless you can prove your hypervisor is un-hackable (don't make me laugh), a virtualized system is less secure.
Even Windows, at the kernel level, is quite secure, and should be more secure than using it with a hypervisor; even a hypervisor made by Microsoft for Windows (or should I say "especially a hypervisor made by Microsoft") will be less secure than the OS alone.
Face it, most modern operating systems are secure enough to run on metal without ever allowing unauthorized access to hardware. The real hacks to worry about are at the application level and the human level, and virtualization has nothing to say about isolation there.
If Crosby were making the case that virtualization makes it easier to manage operating system instances and thus reduce human error in cloud-computing services, I would agree with him. But isolation provided by a hypervisor will never be more secure than a properly designed and tested OS running on metal.
Virtualization will always come with a hardware and network overhead in the case of multimedia mainly. Also Virtualization is great in a static desktop world not a rich desktop world. Needless to say there are some serious issues to overcome if you were to roll out virtualization to a greater diversity of users.
The Turtles project, from IBM, allows nested virtualization on x86 Intel machines; see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbH63kVGTek
We've been running Xenserver in production for 3 years without any issues at all. Performance has been fantastic and the platform has been extremely stable under heavy loads. Plus, we can role out new environments in minutes as opposed to a week. Xenserver rocks.
Nested VMX (in Linux (kernel) Documentation)
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/virtual/kvm/nested-vmx.txt
Qubes OS anyone?
I thought Gordon Freeman took care of this guy already!
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" - Jiddu Krishnamurti
You're insightful. You see the problem clearly. Including the possible "team identification" urges.
And you're lashing out at them.
Take your insight to the next level? Look at how you're presenting your information. Are you just venting, or are you trying to effect change? If you were intentional about effecting change, would you still heartlessly condemn those you were trying to persuade?
100 bash logins, yeah no problem.
100 firefox instances? make sure you have 64gig ram for that dude.
Though if you need 20,000 users who mainly run 1 app and use office, then go for web O365 and webify your app.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.