VIRTUALIZATION

Virtualization

Virtualization

The Project Aims and Objectives

The project aims and objectives are follwing:

Analyse the concept and application of virtualization and the security concerns that are related to its applications.

Evaluate the security concerns that are related to its virtualization.

The security impace of internet on Virtualization

Project Outline

This project will attempt at focusing its attention towards virtualization and security concerns. However, it also creates new concerns (and includes old ones) about security and reliability( Dittner Rule 2007 pp. 1-35 ).

Apart from increased connectivity and a broad range of new services, the Internet has also given technically advanced intruders the opportunity to carry out a variety of attacks, thereby threatening the integrity of its infrastructure and violating the privacy of its users. Despite the current enthusiasm that supersedes the initial reluctance of business and government users, fear of security breaches on the Internet is forcing most organizations to resort to radical solutions based on physical separation between protected private networks - or intranets - and the public Internet. The resulting segmentation is a major impediment to the accomplishment of the concept of a global Internet. Virtualization offers a viable alternative to segmentation by preserving a strongly connected global network.

The Internet can progress in introducing Virtualization mechanisms at various layers of the Internet Protocol Suite. These mechanisms allow for the logical protection of information units during their transfer over the global network and eliminate the need for physical segregation of legitimate traffic from potentially harmful network portions. It is hoped that Virtualized security measures will balance the ease and simplicity of solutions based on physical segmentation and provide a practical means of secure communication over the global network for individual users. Nonetheless, segmentation using firewalls and physically separate intranets will probably remain as the only radical solution for globally protecting enterprise networks against malicious traffic. 

As opposed to physically distinct servers connected over a network (that can presumably be secured or monitored), a virtual environment is an isolated, self-contained "data center in a box," and when all the process-to-process communications that have happened over a network in the past are instead happening inside a single IT enclosure, there's no doubt that security ramifications will be significant(Williams 2007 pp.1-42).

It is true that virtualization technology can introduce some security risks; however, when done properly, virtualization can also provide many security-related benefits. For example centralization of data makes it easier to secure that information, and server-based virtualization technology means sensitive data is not stored on desktops or, more importantly, on laptops that can easily be lost or stolen( Dittner Rule 2007 pp. 1-35 ).

Properly deployed Virtualization technologies can provide an added layer of security to the machines on a network. For best security practices, the operating systems and applications running on VMs would be secured in the same way one would secure them on individual physical machines. Virtualization should be only one of many tools in your security arsenal.

Literature Survey

Virtual machine systems were originally developed to correct some of the shortcomings of the typical third generation architectures and multi-programming operating systems - e.g., OS/360. Such systems had a dual-state hardware organization - a privileged and a non-privileged mode, something that's prevalent today as ...