The impact of virtualisation on securing systems

[J65nko]

From http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05...f_virt_on_sec/

Virtualisation has become an established trend in the x86 server market and is moving into the desktop and notebook space too. It's a great tool for providing flexibility, recoverability and consolidation.

But virtualisation also brings challenges, and security is certainly one of them. Personal or financial data that should be deleted may be retained in libraries of offline virtual machine images. Loading up an old image that has been stored for some time may expose the network to threats from unpatched security holes or out-of-date applications. But while virtualisation brings its own issues, it can also provide the opportunity for fresh thinking to provide a new security paradigm.

[jggimi]

It can also provide an entire new range of unanticipated attack vectors, decreasing stability and security in fact, while providing only the perception of security improvements.