Search Results for: virtualization security

XTS Releases Introspect, Management & Analytics Tool for Citrix XenApp

April 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

XTS today announced the availability of XTS Introspect tool, which enables advanced planning and management of Citrix XenApp virtualization and application delivery environments. XTS, headquartered in the Washington DC metropolitan area, is a Citrix Ready Partner and VMware Technology Alliance Partner and has long been a provider of enterprise reporting and analytics software for the planning and management of Citrix and other virtualization platforms.

From the press release:

Previously, XTS analytics solutions provided intelligence that eased capacity planning, security audits, implementation of charge-back systems and analyzing software license requirements. With Introspect, IT organizations can now enjoy these benefits along with newly available advanced configuration analytics that enable system administrators and architects to easily gather the following information:

Three-dimensional configuration analysis by application, server, and user across an entire server farm

Detailed view of application and server properties

Matrix reports that illustrate where applications are installed and detail user/group access

Historical reporting of server hotfix implementations

To see Introspect first-hand, you’re invited to visit the XTS events to register for an interactive, online seminar for Citrix professionals featuring a presentation from Doug Brown of DABCC.

Solera Networks Releases Beta Version Of Solera V2P Tap

April 9, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

Solera Networks announced today the availability of its beta version of the free Solera V2P Tap, expanding the company’s initiative toward enabling complete network visibility. Using the Solera V2P Tap, organizations deploying virtual machines can leverage their existing investments in network management and security tools by regenerating virtual network traffic, including intra-server virtual machine network traffic, to their existing physical security infrastructure to monitor and protect virtual network activity.

The company recently raised $ 5 Million in Series B funding by Canopy Ventures, which also led the company’s Series A round in 2006.

From the press release:

For many organizations, monitoring and securing the virtual environment means an additional investment to deploy security tools and processes in the virtual network—the same tools they already have in the physical environment. The Solera V2P Tap sits passively in a virtual environment leveraging VMware Vswitch technology, capturing all network traffic from within the virtual environment and regenerating all or some of that traffic in real-time to the physical environment for monitoring and analysis by existing tools.

The free download of the Solera V2P Tap is now available in beta for evaluation. After completion of the beta, the download will continue to be available for free.

[Source: VMblog]

Montego Networks Exits Stealth Mode, Unveils HyperSwitch To Secure Virtualized Networks

March 26, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

Shortly before the start of the security event RSA Conference 2008, the co-founders of Boston-based Montego Networks Bob Darabant and John Peterson announced the launch of their new company, whose Montego HyperSwitch is an innovative virtual security networking solution that delivers policy enforcement, access control, and secure switching for virtual networks.

In their press release, the self-funded company claims virtualization incurs “unique network and application security risks which, if left unaddressed, leave virtual machines, virtualized applications and critical data exposed to service interruptions, data theft, regulatory compliance violations and other threats.”

The company exits stealth mode with their HyperSwitch product, attempting to address these vulnerabilities better than the current available network security solutions, which they claim often offer limited coverage that may create a false sense of security.

“The Montego HyperSwitch approaches virtualized network security from a new direction that integrates network policy enforcement and access control with a high-availability virtual security switch. This unique approach allows the Montego HyperSwitch to efficiently deliver advanced capabilities including policy-based virtual network partitioning, L2-L4 Firewall, Identity Firewall, Content Firewall, virtual network discovery, secure inter-VM communication, 802.1Q VLANs, 802.1D spanning tree, load-balanced Quality of Service (QoS), Policy Based Switching, Policy Based Traffic Mirroring, and more. In addition, Montego’s carefully-calibrated HyperVSecurity technology enables high performance and exceptionally low host resource consumption.”

In April 2008, Montego Networks plans to start offering a Starter Edition of the Montego HyperSwitch as a free download, and selling its Enterprise Edition, for which the introductory price is list-priced at $ 495 USD (per annual software license) in the US.

As for its compatibility roadmap:

“Montego’s HyperVSecurity release 1.5 initially supports VMWare, but has been architected to operate within heterogeneous virtualization environments to provide additional support for Citrix, Virtual Iron, and Microsoft virtualization technology in Q3-2008.”

“Security for virtual environments is imperative. While some security vendors are now touting security for virtual networks, users often find their solutions are incomplete or impractical,” said Bob Darabant. “The Montego HyperSwitch is a completely new approach that integrates high performance virtual security, high-availability virtual switching and an open, interoperable security framework. This allows users to enjoy complete protection for their virtual networks along with the open flexibility to leverage their choice of multi-vendor security offerings.”

You can view a web-video demonstration of Montego Networks here.

[Source: press release]

Live Virtual Machine Migration Vulnerability

March 24, 2008 by Kris Buytaert Leave a Comment

Anthony Liguori has a good summary of the Blackhat paper by Jon Oberheide, Evan Cooke and Farnam Jahanian of the University of Michigan about Xensploit .

The idea of Xensploit is to use a Man in the Middle attack between 2 hosts performing a Live migration. The fundamental flaw is that by default Live migration of virtual machines is unencrypted or often even unauthenticated. Of course good network security practice isolates this kind of traffic in it’s own VLAN, but it shows that security is becoming a bigger issue day by day.

The vulnerability seems to be present with VMWare and Xen versions prior to 3.1 but according to Anthony not with KVM.

Ubuntu Releases “Hardy Heron”, OS Version 8.04 In Beta

March 21, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

After four Alpha releases, Ubuntu has now released version 8.04 of the popular Operating System, code-named “Hardy Heron”, in beta. Apart from the boat load of new features, libvirt and virt-manager have been integrated in Ubuntu. They allow for easy guest creation and basic management of virtual machines out of the box. Virt-manager can be used to administer guests on a remote server.

The kernel also includes virtio, greatly improving I/O performance in guests.

The beta version of Ubuntu 8.04 also comes with the following new features:

Xorg 7.3

The latest Xorg, Xorg 7.3, is available in Hardy, with an emphasis on better autoconfiguration with a minimal configuration file. This Beta brings a new Screen Resolution utility that allows users to dynamically configure the resolution, refresh rate, and rotation of a second monitor. This will be particularly handy for laptop users that connect to a projector or external monitor.

Linux kernel 2.6.24

This Beta includes the 2.6.24-12.13 kernel based on 2.6.24.3. This brings in significant enhancements and fixes that have been merged in the last few months into the mainline kernel.

GNOME 2.22

Hardy Heron Beta brings you the latest and greatest GNOME 2.22 with lots of new features and improvements, such as a new Nautilus that uses GVFS as its backend. GVFS makes it possible to fix shortcomings of Nautilus such as the inability to restore files from trash, pause and undo file operations, and will make it possible to escalate user privileges for certain operations using PolicyKit for authentication. It also brings a significant performance boost to many operations.

PolicyKit

PolicyKit is now integrated in the administrative user interfaces. PolicyKit allows fine-grained control over user permissions and enhances usability and security, by allowing administrative applications to be run as a normal user and gaining extra privileges dynamically only for privileged operations instead of requiring the whole application to run as root.

PulseAudio

PulseAudio is now enabled by default. Some non-GNOME applications still need to be changed to output to pulse/esd by default and the volume control tools are not yet integrated.

Firefox 3 Beta 4

Firefox 3 Beta 4 replaces Firefox 2 as the default browser, bringing much better system integration including GTK2 form buttons and common dialogs. and icon theming that matches the system.

Transmission

The GTK version of the popular Transmission BitTorrent client comes preinstalled in Ubuntu, replacing the Gnome BitTorrent downloader.

Vinagre

The new Vinagre VNC client is installed by default in Beta, replacing xvnc4viewer. Vinagre allows the user to view multiple machines simultaneously, can discover VNC servers on the network via Avahi, and can keep track of recently used and favorite connections.

Brasero

The Brasero CD/DVD burning application, which will complement the CD/DVD burning functions of Nautilus and replace the Serpentine audio CD burning utility, is installed by default in Beta.

World Clock Applet

Integrating the features of the intlclock applet, the GNOME panel clock in Beta can display the time and weather in multiple locations.

Inkscape

Inkscape 0.46 introduces native PDF support, providing an easy, open source solution to editing text and graphics in PDF documents. Users will appreciate being able to draw up flyers, posters, and other docmuents, save them as PDF in inkscape, and send them to a print shop for printing without ever leaving Ubuntu or loading a proprietary tool.

ActiveDirectory integration

Likewise Open, available from the universe repository, enables seamless integration of Ubuntu within an Active Directory network. Users can use their AD credentials to log onto Ubuntu machines and access any kerberized services provided by an Ubuntu Server.

iSCSI support

iSCSI Initiator has been fully integrated in the kernel, allowing Ubuntu to mount iSCSI targets as a block device. iSCSI is available in the Ubuntu Server installer if iscsi=true is passed on the kernel command line at the beginning of the install process.

Firewall

Ubuntu 8.04 Beta includes ufw (Uncomplicated Firewall), a new host-based firewall application configurable from the command line which is designed to make administering a firewall easier for end users while not getting in the way of network administrators.

Memory Protection

Additional access checks have been added so that /dev/mem and /dev/kmem can only be used to access device memory. These changes will help defend against rootkits and other malicious code.

The lower 64K of system memory is no longer addressable by default. This will help defend against malicious code that attempts to leverage kernel bugs into security vulnerabilities.

Applications compiled as Position Independent Executables (PIE) are now placed into memory in unpredictable locations, making it harder for security vulnerabilities to be exploited.

Wubi

There is a new installation option for Windows users. Wubi allows users to install and uninstall Ubuntu like any other Windows application. It does not require a dedicated partition, nor does it affect the existing bootloader, yet users can experience a dual-boot setup almost identical to a full installation. Wubi works with a physical CD or in stand-alone mode, by downloading an appropriate ISO to install from. It can be found on the root of the CD as Wubi.exe. A full installation within a dedicated partition is still recommended, but Wubi is a great way to try Ubuntu for a few days and weeks before committing dedicated disk resources.

umenu

WinFOSS and the Windows open source software have been replaced by umenu, a simple launcher that lets the user install Ubuntu from Windows using Wubi, install Ubuntu to a partition without having to make their CD-ROM the first boot device.

To download the Ubuntu 8.04 Beta check out this page. The full and final OS is expected to be released next month.

[Source: TechConnect Magazine]

VMworld Europe 2008 in Video

At this year’s VMworld Europe in Cannes (France), Virtualization.com went wild and recorded dozens of videos featuring marketing, technical & product managers, executives, company founders and analysts from the virtualization industry. Here’s a recap of what our insomniac bloggers Tarry Singh and Nicolas ‘ Charbax‘ Charbonnier have been up to in Cannes:

Interviews

Video: Interview Richard Garsthagen, Organizer of VMworld Europe 2008

Video: Interview Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource – Citrix Video: Interview with Mike Neil, Virtual Machine Technologies Product Unit Manager with Microsoft

Video: Interview Bogomil Balkansky, Senior Director of Product Marketing at VMware

Video:Interview Greg Ness, VP Marketing with Blue Lane Technologies

Video: Interview Mike Grandinetti, VP & Chief Marketing Officer with Virtual Iron

Video: Interview Andrew Barnes, Senior VP of Corporate Development with The Neverfail Group

Video: Interview Chuck Tatham, VP Marketing & Business Development with CiRBA

Video: Interview Susannah Kirksey, VP Marketing with ClearCube

Video: Interview Sameer Jagtap, VP Product Management with Surgient

Video: Interview Jay Litkey, Founder & CEO Embotics

Video: Interview Tamar Newberger, VP Marketing at Catbird Security

Video: Interview Ratmir Timashev, President & CEO of Veeam

Video: Interview Ian Robinson, VP Marketing with Transitive