Security Strategies in Linux Platforms and Applications, 3rd Edition

The Effect of Virtualization on Security

Virtualization makes it easy to start with a very secure baseline system. Because virtual-machine hard disks reside on only a few very large files, it takes just a few commands to create new virtual machines. In other words, you can start with a stripped-down, well-hardened system and add a single service, blocking packets to all unused ports, and securing every other account and directory with appropriate mandatory access controls.

Virtualization is essential to most computing environments, whether it’s a small company or a much larger enterprise network. One of the issues with virtualization is that you don’t have physical systems to look at. Instead, you have a lot of logical systems that may be much ...