Hypervisors: The cloud’s potential security Achilles heel (http://www.zdnet.com)
Technology – Cyber Security
When some security companies talk about potential threats they tend to, it hypes the danger. When someone who works with cloud technology, like Linux kernel developer and cloud company Nebula’s senior security software engineer Matthew Garret talks about potential security problems in cloud computing, I sit up and take notice.
Best known for finding ways to get Linux to work with Windows 8’s secure boot , Garret is also both a low-level security and cloud expert. At the Linux Foundation’s Linux Collabration Summit, Garrett explained that his greatest worry is hypervisors.
Hypervisors, as ZDNet’s own Dan Kusnetzky explained in his book, Virtualization: A Manager’s Guide, “can run one or more complete virtual systems on a physical machine. Each of these systems—such as Linux’s KVM, Microsoft’s Hyper-V or VMware’s vSphere/ESXi—process as if it has total control of its own system, even though it may only be using a portion of the capabilities of a larger physical system.”
It is the virtual machines (VMs) that the hypervisors automatically generate on servers on demand that we’re using when we work on the cloud. Without modern hypervisors, the cloud simply couldn’t exist.
So, the real security question for the cloud starts with: “Can you trust your cloud provider’s hypervisor?” Garrett’s answer is “maybe.”
(Continue reading at http://www.zdnet.com)
My Two Cents: My Answer to “Can you trust your cloud provider’s hypervisor?” …is NO!
