February 27th, 2008
VMware's security strategy: Cut hackers off at the hypervisor
It didn’t take long for VMware to answer the security bell. The company on Wednesday announced a technology called VMsafe that aims to integrate security software with the hypervisor–the linchpin of virtualization software.
With VMsafe VMware will provide APIs to allow security application vendors to develop products to fend off malware. Security in virtualized environments is going to become a big issues and a few vulnerabilities have already surfaced.
VMware is trying to get ahead of that threat with VMsafe. The company said in a statement that “VMsafe technology integrates into the VMware hypervisor and provides the transparency to prevent threats and attacks such as viruses, trojans and keyloggers from ever reaching a virtual machine.”
Meanwhile, 20 security vendors have signed up with VMsafe to develop products. Of course these vendors would be idiots if they didn’t develop security wares for virtualizations–that’s a fine growth curve to ride.
These yet-to-come products would tie into VMsafe to provide a peek into the memory, CPU, disk and I/O systems of a virtual machine and then monitor them. In the meantime, you may want to keep those workarounds in mind until the security cavalry arrives.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
