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posted by CoolHand on Thursday May 14 2015, @04:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the breaking-out-of-the-sandbox dept.

A security research firm is warning that a new bug could allow a hacker to take over vast portions of a datacenter -- from within. The zero-day vulnerability lies in a legacy common component in widely-used virtualization software, allowing a hacker to infiltrate potentially every machine across a datacenter's network.

Most datacenters nowadays condense customers -- including major technology companies and smaller firms -- into virtualized machines, or multiple operating systems on one single server. Those virtualized systems are designed to share resources but remain as separate entities in the host hypervisor, which powers the virtual machines. A hacker can exploit this newly-discovered bug, known as "Venom" -- an acronym for "Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation" -- to gain access to the entire hypervisor, as well as every network-connected device in that datacenter.

The cause is a widely-ignored, legacy virtual floppy disk controller that, if sent specially crafted code, can crash the entire hypervisor. That can allow a hacker to break out of their own virtual machine to access other machines -- including those owned by other people or companies.

The bug, found in open-source computer emulator QEMU, dates back to 2004. Many modern virtualization platforms, including Xen, KVM, and Oracle's VirtualBox, include the buggy code. VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Bochs hypervisors are not affected.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/venom-security-flaw-millions-of-virtual-machines-datacenters/

The Linux Foundation security advisory: http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-3456

National Cyber Awareness System: https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2015-3456

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by gnuman on Thursday May 14 2015, @04:40PM

    by gnuman (5013) on Thursday May 14 2015, @04:40PM (#182983)

    Aside from that, if you are using VMs for "security, you are doing it wrong.

    I think you don't know what VMs are. Their main purpose is isolation.

    But I guess you can say this about anything "If you are using X for "security" you are doing it wrong", where you can put DNSSEC, IPSEC, TLS, SSH, network air gaps, (Intel,AMD,XYZ) CPUs etc. on any of them. Then when someone finds a vulnerability, you'll be vindicated, right?

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @04:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2015, @04:54PM (#182993)

    "If you are using X for "security" you are doing it wrong", where you can put DNSSEC, IPSEC, TLS, SSH, network air gaps, (Intel,AMD,XYZ) CPUs etc.

    I noticed that you didn't include obscurity in your list. I guess that means I'm finally doing it right ;-)

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Ryuugami on Thursday May 14 2015, @07:00PM

      by Ryuugami (2925) on Thursday May 14 2015, @07:00PM (#183055)

      "If you are using X for "security" you are doing it wrong", where you can put DNSSEC, IPSEC, TLS, SSH, network air gaps, (Intel,AMD,XYZ) CPUs etc.

      I noticed that you didn't include obscurity in your list.

      It's obscured in the "etc".

      --
      If a shit storm's on the horizon, it's good to know far enough ahead you can at least bring along an umbrella. - D.Weber
    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 14 2015, @07:37PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Thursday May 14 2015, @07:37PM (#183080) Journal

      Nor enumeration of bad things. ;-)

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by LoRdTAW on Thursday May 14 2015, @08:09PM

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Thursday May 14 2015, @08:09PM (#183099) Journal

      No, it's there. You just don't know it's there because the parent poster is hoping you won't find it.