Ahem...I hope you don't mind getting back to my original issue:
 
Sean W, can you elaborate on the security risks to the host? I guess the core issue for me is to understand if there are actually any additional security vulnerabilities because it's virtualised. What is the attack vectorCan a hypervisor be compromised by traffic to one of it's guests when there is no IP stack loaded for the host?
 
I understand that the real danger is that if one of the guests were compromised it may expose the configuration/virtualisation/networking features of the host but that doesn't mean a VM guest/router is any less secure than a hardware router. The compromise is in the router OS & that's the same for a hardware router.
 
Thoughts?
 
 
Kelly

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 9:52 PM, Sean Walberg <swalberg@gmail.com> wrote:
If you don't have to submit to the wrath of an auditor, it's probably good enough.

In terms of security risks, your hypervisor/host OS needs to be locked down, as an attacker could present the WAN NIC to another guest and route it that way, or launch a new VM with both NICs. Again, not something to worry about at home.

FWIW, the auditors I've run up against, especially in PCI, don't look at the virtual switching in a virtual environment the way they do on a physical switch. That is, they won't blink if you separate two networks with VLANs, but put two VMs on different VLANs using a trunk to the ESX server and oh boy...

Sean

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 9:00 PM, Kelly Leveille <kel@kelweb.ca> wrote:
Hi All,

I'm considering setting up a firewall/router in a virtual machine to seperate a couple networks in my home. I intend to dedicate one of the host NICs to the WAN port of the router VM & will not load a TCP stack for that NIC in the host OS (ESXi supports this config). In theory, this configuration is as secure as a hardware router because packets can only be routed via the VM.

My questions are:

Have any of you had any good/bad experiences with this type of setup & are there potential security risks I'm not considering?

Also, if you think this is not as secure as a hardware based solution, please explain why not.

I'm not doing it to save money. I am aware that I could do the same thing with a consumer router. I'm just interested in the possibility.

Thanks,
--
Kelly
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Sean Walberg <sean@ertw.com>    http://ertw.com/



--
Kelly