Virtualization's potential security benefits are certainly compelling, but many are quite conditional and altogether they are certainly no panacea.
Moreover, virtualization introduces new threats to an infrastructure—threats that otherwise either wouldn't be a concern at all or are exacerbated by virtualization.
This section calls attention to vulnerabilities that are historically problematic for virtual infrastructures:
- Denial of service attacks
- VM escape and hyper jumping
- Server sprawl
- Growing complexity
Denial of service (DoS) attacks come in a wide variety of flavors. However, the immediate intent is the same: overwhelming a network, and its administrators, by generating large amounts of illegitimate traffic.
Distributed denial of service (DDoS) and DoS attacks are cheap, effective, and increasingly common. On the surface, they seem to be most effective at rendering services unavailable or unusable. More insidious, perhaps, is that, by keeping...