Take the hottest datacenter technology, add a generous pinch of security scrutiny, and a dash of clever name recognition... and ‘Wha-La!’, you have ingredients for our latest topic of vulnerability du jour: Xensploit.

Although Xensploit assumes the attacker has access to a protected network, it aptly demonstrates how one can man-in-the-middle live migration traffic to commandeer endpoints in arguably limitless ways. After all, there’s something to be said for the degree of control represented by the bits and bytes of replicated VM data traversing the wire. If unfettered access to system memory is the holy-grail for most attackers, live migration lets the treasure leave the confines of your server’s DIMM slots.

At IBM.

[ Read more ]