Source: Altor Networks

Date: April 2009

Type: White Paper

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Overview: View the "Alternatives for Securing Virtual Networks" white paper which describes virtualization security threats and challenges with virtual networks and cloud computing. Add defense-in-depth security to your virtualized data center with Altor VF virtual firewall.

An increasingly large share of data center network traffic is occurring between VMs within a virtualization server - on the “virtual network” - yet VM and network administrators have minimal ability to see or control inter-VM communication. By default, every VM on the host can communicate directly with every other VM through a simple virtual switch, without any inter-VM traffic monitoring or policy-based inspection and filtering.

Inter-VM traffic on a host doesn’t touch the physical network: it is invisible to traditional network monitoring tools and unprotected by physical network security devices. As a result, VMs are highly vulnerable to attack. For example, a buffer overflow attack on a vulnerable application can enable an attacker to run arbitrary code in a VM. With no packet inspection or filtering of virtual network traffic, the attacker can gain access to all other VMs resident on the host.

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