Thursday, 17 May 2012
Addressing Security Risks in Virtualized Environments: Beware of the Superuser
Addressing Security Risks in Virtualized Environments: Beware of the Superuser
By Michael Liou | Oct 29, 2008
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PrintAs enterprises around the world adopt virtualization to reduce data center costs, improve business agility, and ensure business continuity, they must take appropriate measures to address and control security risks that are intensified in virtualized environments.
In particular, virtualization requires more diligent management of privileged accounts. Operating systems include a native “superuser” account that gives a user or application unlimited privileges on a given server. On UNIX servers, this is the root account and on Windows it is the Administrator account. Anyone with superuser-level access can read, write, and delete files, start and stop services, and even read and modify audit logs. In many data centers, this account is a security risk because its account password is often common knowledge among a team of server administrators.
Virtualization significantly exacerbates this vulnerability, because it exposes a larger number of virtual machines—each of which may have very different functions from both an application and business perspective—to a single policy violation.
These vulnerabilities are especially troubling in the light of regulatory mandates such as Sarbanes Oxley, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, and European Union Privacy Directives. These set the standard for IT organizations to diligently control access to sensitive or private data—and serious consequences often accompany any failure to do so. IT organizations must therefore carefully guard against the risks virtualization presents in terms of both data security and regulatory compliance.
Securing the Virtualization Architecture
With virtualization, operating systems and their respective superuser accounts exist on two layers: the physical hosting layer and the virtual server layer. Each physical server has a single hosting layer—sometimes referred to as the hypervisor or privileged partition—which supports all of the dependent virtual servers. This physical server layer has an associated superuser account. Every virtual machine hosted on that physical server also has its own instance of the operating system and an associated superuser account.
For example, a physical server hosting five virtual servers would have six superuser accounts: one for the physical server and one for each of the five virtual servers. All five virtual server superuser accounts need to be governed appropriately. Anyone with superuser access to one of those virtual servers could not only wreak havoc on that individual virtual server, but by maliciously consuming a disproportionate amount of physical processing power, memory, or network bandwidth, the other four virtual servers could be affected as well.
However, the major security risk associated with virtualization is the hypervisor layer. With superuser access at the hypervisor level, someone can directly and drastically impact all five virtual servers running on that one physical machine. So the potential for problematic behavior becomes five times as serious.
For example, virtual servers are often consolidated into a single file or set of files to make it easier to move them from one physical server to another. Someone with superuser access at the hypervisor has unregulated access to these files. This means that they could potentially remove a virtual server’s entire image file with a few simple keystrokes—which is roughly equivalent to breaking into the server room and walking away with an entire physical machine, including all of its data.
Such risk is obviously unacceptable. IT organizations must therefore take appropriate measures to prevent misuse of superuser privileges.
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