Live data from Hacker News

A fast, Cross-VM attack on AES [pdf]

eprint.iacr.org

11–12 of 12 posts

Re: A fast, Cross-VM attack on AES [pdf]

#11
post #6

Virtualization is not a security implementation. I've been saying this for years and I'll continue to keep my tinfoil hat on. As Theo DeRaadt said You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes. I caugh…

While I agree with Theo in principle, it sounds like he's precluding the possibility that one can create a virtualization layer with formally-proven correctness guarantees (be it a hypervisor, an OS, or an application VM). For example, seL4 is proven to be free of many common types of bugs (NULL pointer dereferences, use-after-free errors, buffer overflows, etc.) that lead to security holes. AFAIK, there is no such proof for OpenBSD.

I'm not trying to suggest that a virtualization layer with formal proofs of correctness is a security panacea (it's not--correctness is necessary but not sufficient for security). What I am suggesting is that there is a way forward to developing secure virtualization layers.

If anything, this paper suggests to me that it would be best if the lowest layer in the stack (be it the OS or the hypervisor) implemented some of the crypto primitives on behalf of the applications. I can't see any other way to run them while also guaranteeing that (1) their execution is correct with the specification, (2) they run in full isolation from one another, and (3) they avoid timing attacks and whatever side-channels we can think of.

Re: A fast, Cross-VM attack on AES [pdf]

#12
post #10
post #6

Virtualization is not a security implementation. I've been saying this for years and I'll continue to keep my tinfoil hat on. As Theo DeRaadt said You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes. I caugh…

Virtualization does offer additional security if it's used to isolate things that otherwise would have been running on the same host. For example, at my old job we used OpenVZ to isolate wordpress, twiki, and roundcube, whereas historically we would have had them all installed on the same webserver. I think this is the original source of the confusion, which has since disseminated to those who don't understand the nu…

same webserver would have had users and groups - you have bought complexity instead of using the existing mechanisms
Post reply on HN