IBM's Work on Virtualization Security
IBM isn't the stiffed-shirt old school IT behemoth that it looked like when the dot com boom made selling pet food over the Web at a loss all the rage. It's dumped its hard drive and PC manufacturing units and focused attention on leading edge technologies. One those is virtualization security. IBM seems to be making a major effort in this area but isn't out too many details.
An IBM press release describes the initiative:
IBM's PHANTOM initiative aims to create virtualization security technology to efficiently monitor and disrupt malicious communications between virtual machines without being compromised. In addition, full visibility of virtual hardware resources would allow PHANTOM to monitor the execution state of virtual machines, protecting them against both known and unknown threats before they occur. It is also designed to increase the security posture of the hypervisor -- a critical point of vulnerability; because once an attacker gains control of the hypervisor, they gain control of all of the machines running on the virtualized platform. For the first time, the hypervisor -- the gateway to the virtualized world and all that lays above it -- can be locked down.
Ars Technica has been trying to get more info but details remain sketchy:
Plenty of important questions remain unanswered on the project, like whether it's software-only or has a hardware component. It's also not clear if PHANTOM is strictly for IBM's mainframes, or if it will be used in commodity (i.e., x86) servers as well.
What ever the breadth of the project, IBM's involvement will be welcome by customers. Securing virtualized servers, along with rolling out trusted computing platforms and combating evolving malware, is at the top of IT security's to do list.
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