RE: VMWare poor guest isolation design
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