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by vel0city 175 days ago
Virtual machines are never a security boundary. If you configure them correctly, avoid all the footguns, and pray that there's no VM escape vulnerabilities that affect "correctly" configured VMs then they can be a crude approximation of a security boundary that may be enough for your use case, but they aren't a suitable substitute for entirely separate hardware.

Its all turtles, all the way down.
1 comments
flaminHotSpeedo 175 days ago
Yeah, in some (rare) situations physical isolation is a more appropriate level of security. Or if you want to land somewhere in between, you can use VM's with single tenant NUMA nodes.

But for a typical case, VM's are the bare minimum to say you have a _secure_ isolation boundary because the attack surface is way smaller.

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vel0city 175 days ago
Yeah, so secure.

https://support.broadcom.com/web/ecx/support-content-notific...

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-5183

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-12130

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-2698

https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-4936

In the end you need to configure it properly and pray there's no escape vulnerabilities. The same standard you applied to containers to say they're definitely never a security boundary. Seems like you're drawing some pretty arbitrary lines here.

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