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Posts Tagged ‘virtualisation’

Black Hat EU: You are Doing it Wrong: Failures in Virtualization Systems – By Claudio Criscione

March 18th, 2011 No comments
Wrong Way ... Way Wrong a CC NC SA image from Bob.Fornal's Flickr stream

Wrong Way ... Way Wrong a CC NC SA image from Bob.Fornal's Flickr stream

Virtualization aims to save money, make things simple and quick to deploy. Saving money and quick deployment are arch enemies of security

Virtualization products require security on the hypervisor level. Being able to hop from one virtual machine to another is not acceptable. Also there are a lot of products that focus on the security in the virtual machines, but virtualized infrastructure are complex by nature.

Relative lame bugs like XSS can be a big deal in virtualization infrastructures

Claudio demonstrates that live on stage, by exploiting a XSS bug in VMWare vCenter which took 1.5 years to patch.

Claudio showed us how an unprivileged user on the vCenter machine able to read a logfile contain the administrator SOAP session ID. Using this ID and Vasto administrator privileges where obtained. Until the last patch read-only access to vCenter meant that the user could take over the virtual infrastructure using standard tools.

Next attack demonstrated is against an Oracle virtual machine. Using standard “lame” exploits Claudio was able to hope from the application level administrator to the system root account.

So there are still some very simple vulnerabilities in this software.

Virtualization software is broken today, and we have to treat it accordingly. We have to make people aware that it is broken.

Virtualization infrastructures should be setup in such a way that a XSS in the management layer cannot lead to a disaster.

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BlackhatEU : Virtual Forensics

April 15th, 2010 No comments

By Christiaan Beek

From isfullofcrap Flickr photo stream. Creative Commons License

From isfullofcrap Flickr photo stream. Creative Commons License

BlackhatEU : Virtual Forensics
By Christiaan Beek

What are the challenges when you have to do forensics on a virtual environment?
•    What are the tools available?
•    Are the tools forensically sound?
•    Where is the data?
•    Who owns the data?
•    What forensic techniques do we use?
•    How to acquire data from the cloud?

Citrix is a nightmare for forensics investigators. There is no personal hard disk to investigate, only a personal profile which does not have very much data in it.
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What startrek tells us about the future of IT security…

September 29th, 2009 No comments

Robert “RSnake” Hansen has written a wonderfull peace about what Startrek can tell us about future IT security

Virtualization security is an oxymoron – even in the distant future: I mean, really, how many times has the whole damned ship been taken over by some overzealous holodeck character? Whoever wrote the holodeck hypervisor really needs to be put in a room with Warf for a few hours so he can explain with his batleth what the need for true physical and logical isolation is. Why some Sherlock Holmes character should have access to main memory, I’ll never know. Too bad we aren’t smart enough in the distant future to think about hardware isolation instead of relying exclusively on dangerously faulty software.

You should really check it out have a laugh and then think about it…