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When moving from a physical infrastructure to a virtual one, many new threats arise. With the expansion of virtualization to the cloud, their list expands, and the executable damage from their performance increases many times. In this article, I would like to talk about one of the intense "sunrise" threats in the virtual environment - hypervisor vulnerabilities.
Let's consider the main classes of vulnerabilities of hypervisors using VMware vSphere equally an example and possible ways to protect against their exploitation.

Buffer overflow and arbitrary code invocation

Certain errors in the hypervisor can have buffer overflows and trigger arbitrary inscribe carrying out. Errors can be contained either on the side of the virtual infrastructure management when they are operated externally, with or without administrator rights, or unofficially of virtual machines. In the second case, information technology is latent to choke outside the essential machine and action any commands along the hypervisor.

Examples of known vulnerabilities:

CVE-2012-1516 ... 1517, CVE-2012-2448 ... 2450 - The VMX process in ESXi 4.0-5.0 and ESX 3.5-4.1 is vulnerable due to an wrongdoing in processing RPC commands, exploitation of the exposure could conduce to overflow computer storage and arbitrary code execution on the host operating system from guest operating systems.

CVE-2013-3657 - A remote user fanny send a specially crafted packet to ESX 4.0-4.1 and ESXi 4.0-5.0 and cause a buffer overflow with arbitrary code execution or denial of service.

CVE-2013-1405 - A far user can send a specially crafted say-so package to ESX 3.5-4.1, ESXi 3.5-5.0 and vSphere Server 4.0-4.1, which bequeath grounds buffer overflows and discretional code execution.

CVE-2012-2448- A remote drug user can send a specially crafted NFS package to ESX 3.5-4.1 and ESXi 3.5-5.0 and cause a buffer overflow with the launch of arbitrary code operating theatre denial of service.

The virtualization protection tools that help filter every dealings to the hypervisor will help protect against attacks from the side of virtual infrastructure management.
IT is more difficult to protect oneself from so much errors on the part of virtual machines by substance of superimposed means, simply the consequences of an attack crapper be leveled, for example, using the contour wholeness control mechanism.

Drug user ALT inside a virtual machine

A whole class of hypervisor vulnerabilities can disrupt the guest operative system of a practical machine and increase user rights in it. In the ESX / ESXi environment, such attacks are usually carried out in ii main directions - exploiting vulnerabilities in VMware Tools (a set of utilities and a driver for the guest operating system of rules) or direct direct access to the virtual political machine's memory through and through the hypervisor bypassing the guest operating system access code mechanisms.

Consider the following examples:

CVE-2012-1666 - VMware Tools vulnerability in ESX 4.0-5.0 allows to increase access rights for a exploiter of a client in operation system of rules interior it by means of tpfc.dll file away malware infection.

CVE-2012-1518 is a vulnerability of ESXi 3.5-5.0 and ESX 3.5-4.1, which allows increasing the approach rights of a node OS user within IT by using buffer overspill in VMware Tools if the access rights for the directory with VMware Tools are configured incorrectly.

You can protect yourself from this class of vulnerabilities by refusing to establis VMware Tools and victimisation the classic means of protecting information from unauthorized access inside the guest operating organisation, similar to a physical computing machine.

Denial of armed service

At the end of the list is the least open socio-economic class of vulnerabilities in terms of compromising information, only such vulnerabilities affect another indicator - availableness. And their implementation negatively affects the quality of the cloud over provider's services, the reputation of the service, and, ultimately, the profit. We are talking astir hypervisor errors, victimisation which an attacker can lead to a denial of service without spending a lot of effort. Demurrer of service by generating a large amount of junk dealings is not considered a hypervisor-specific scourge. We are talking about vulnerabilities in which one or more simple network packets or commands cause the entire hypervisor operating theatre its individual services to stop working.
As in the case of memory overflow, these errors buttocks personify contained some in external interfaces and in the internal functions of virtual machines.

Examples of such vulnerabilities:

CVE-2013-5970 - the hostd-vmdb service in ESXi 4.0-4.1 and ESXi 4.0-5.0 can be disabled by sending a specially prepared network mailboat.

CVE-2012-5703 - The External Services API (vSphere API) in ESXi 4.1 and ESXi 4.1 contain an error that could cause the Robert William Service accepting API requests to gate-crash and fail if the RetrieveProp and RetrievePropEx require parameters are incorrect.

Auspices against attacks from external users is similar to aegis against buffer overflows when virtualization protection tools are applied that dribble all dealings going to the hypervisor.
From the side of virtual machines, universal protection solutions do non be yet.

Closing

On that point is besides a universal way of trade protection against known attacks, for lesson, applying certificate updates ("patches") of the manufacturer itself and updating software versions to the latest.
However, such protection has two drawbacks. Firstly, in that location are a large number of vulnerabilities that are legendary sole to a narrow roach of attackers, simply so far unnamed to the manufacturer and, accordingly, unaccounted for by IT. Secondly, when using the FSTEC certified hypervisor, its updates are prohibited, American Samoa they violate the integrity of binary files.
Thence, it is recommended to use certified overlay security tools for the virtual infrastructure and, if possible, use the not-certified latest version hypervisor with the latest security updates. Exclusive this method allows you to neutralize the scourge associated with the front of vulnerabilities in the software of the hypervisor.

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