In the grand scheme of things -think the matrix- the question might not be "to be or not to be", but instead evolve to "to be real or not to be real" Let's look at the evolutions:
Now with all that, how do we react ? It all depends what you use it for. E.g. I use parallels on my Mac to be able to run windows applications on my mac when (and if) I need it. When teaching about security I run a virtual machine that has known vulnerabilities to demo how easy it is for real attackers to attack a system and how little skill it requires to execute a program that gives you a command prompt on a target. If that is what you run a virtualization suite for, you're not more or less at risk than you were before. If I'm a malware researcher, I'd be extra careful not to trust the malware to break out of the virtual machine, they already detect it, what could be more delaying in the analysis of their contraption than to zap the host OS ? If I were to feel my host OS was immune to attack (fanboys to /dev/null please) due to the more targeted OS being in a virtual machine I might be in for a rude awakening down the line as those attacks might start to build in things to break out of their segregated environment. Having that false sense of security is a really bad thing. If I buy less separated machines but instead buy more redundant hardware that's more powerful and run machines together on a shared hardware platform, I'd watch carefully what I'm putting together. It would be a bad idea to put e.g. the firewall, an IDS probe outside of the perimeter and the web server and database server all on one shared platform as if one if broken, all can be broken without going through the layers separated hardware would have provided. Even if all the hosts are from a same security layer there's increased risk as the machines can talk among themselves without passing through the network layer but that's probably easier to mitigate. So it does depend on your architecture and what you mix together. If I'm a organization that has air-gapped networks that carry differently classified data on, it would be a very risky move to migrate those two hosts on those who need access to both networks onto a virtual machine setup. Better invest in that KVM switch if you need the real estate on those desks. -- |
Swa 760 Posts Sep 22nd 2007 |
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Sep 22nd 2007 1 decade ago |
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