On Wed, 24 Oct 2007, L. V. Lammert wrote:

quoted text
>Virtualization provides near absolute security - DOM0 is not visible to
>the user at all, only passing network traffic and handling kernel calls.
>The security comes about in that each DOMU is totally isolated from the
>the others, while the core DOM0 is isolated from any attacks.

In theory, you're correct.

In practice there are (at least) four questions which all must be
answered in the affirmative for this to be true:

1) Does the hardware architecture provide all of the hooks needed to
   implement virtualization?
2) Does the specific hardware correctly implement that architecture?
3) Does the virtualization software architecture properly implement
   virtualization?
4) Does the specific software correctly implement that architecture?

Answering any of those questions takes both a lot of work and, all too
often, access to information which is not generally available.  And if
any of the answers is 'no', the security of anything run under that
virtualization may be fatally compromised -- no matter how secure that
software may be when run standalone.

	Dave

-- 
Dave Anderson
<dave@daveanderson.com>