Technology

60182 readers

4509 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Keep Tier-One Applications Out of Virtual Environments (www.darkreading.com)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/technology

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

After reading this article, I had a few dissenting thoughts, maybe someone will provide their perspective?

The article suggests not running critical workloads virtually based on a failure scenario of the hosting environment (such as ransomware on hypervisor).

That does allow using the 'all your eggs in one basket' phrase, so I agree that running at least one instance of a service physically could be justified, but threat actors will be trying to time execution of attacks against both if possible. Adding complexity works both ways here.

I don't really agree with the comments about not patching however. The premise that the physical workload or instance would be patched or updated more than the virtual one seems unrelated. A hesitance to patch systems is more about up time vs downtime vs breaking vs risk in my opinion.

Is your organization running critical workloads virtual like anything else, combination physical and virtual, or combination of all previous plus cloud solutions (off prem)?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] ramielrowe 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

If we boil this article down to it's most basic point, it actually has nothing to do with virtualization. The true issue here is actually centralized infra/application management. The article references two ESXi CVE's that deal with compromised management interfaces. Imagine a scenario where we avoid virtualization by running Kubernetes on bare metal nodes, and each Pod gets exclusive assignment to a Node. If a threat actor has access to the Kubernetes management interface, and can exploit a vulnerability to access that management interface, it can immediately compromise everything within that Kubernetes cluster. We don't even need to have a container management platform. Imagine a collection of bare-metal nodes managed by Ansible via Ansible Automation Platform (AAP). If a threat actor has access to AAP and exploit it, it then can compromise everything managed by that AAP instance. This author fundamentally misattributes the issue to virtualization. The issue is centralized management and there are significant benefits to using higher-order centralized management solutions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Agreed.

Dont we all use centralized management because there is cost and risk involved when we don't.

More management complexity, missed systems, etc.

So we're balancing risk vs operational costs.

Makes sense to swap out virtual for container solutions or automation solutions for discussion.

[–] francisfordpoopola 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Would you care to expand on this? I understand many of the pieces mentioned but am not an expert on this and am trying to learn.

[–] ramielrowe 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

In a centralized management scenario, the central controlling service needs the ability to control everything registered with it. So, if the central controlling service is compromised, it is very likely that everything it controlled is also compromised. There are ways to mitigate this at the application level, like role-based and group-based access controls. But, if the service itself is compromised rather than an individual's credentials, then the application protections can likely all be bypassed. You can mitigate this a bit by giving each tenant their own deployment of the controlling service, with network isolation between tenants. But, even that is still not fool-proof.

Fundamentally, security is not solved by one golden thing. You need layers of protection. If one layer is compromised, others are hopefully still safe.

[–] francisfordpoopola 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Makes perfect sense. I'm not as familiar with the admin side of things.

TY for taking the time to explain.