bugtraq - Re: More on VMWare poor guest isolation design

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Message-Id: <20070827143735.3FD0A1F3E97@spike.porcupine.org>
Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2007 10:37:35 -0400 (EDT)
From: wietse@...cupine.org (Wietse Venema)
To: "M. Burnett" <mb@...o.net>
Cc: "'Arthur Corliss'" <corliss@...italmages.com>,
	"'Jonathan Yu'" <jonathan.i.yu@...il.com>, bugtraq@...urityfocus.com
Subject: Re: More on VMWare poor guest isolation design

M. Burnett:
> It doesn't matter how secure all my guests are or that I use extremely
> secure passwords or that I am current on all my patches or I am running a
> super-tight firewall on each guest. A single API call bypasses all of that.

It doesn't even take an API. If you're running a virtual machine
from your own account, your account has control over the virtual
machine. It can subvert the hardware, it can modify the contents
of virtual memory, the virtual disk image, and so on.

This is a basic but often overlooked principle with virtualization:
a virtual machine is no more secure than the platform (or in this
case user account) it runs on.

	Wietse