Question

Respond to the following in a minimum of 175 words:

Today's datacenters are populated with not only physical hardware but systems hosting virtual machines and containers. These systems communicate locally and around the globe over networks.

Discuss two different examples of threats to various parts of heterogeneous architectures and how they might manifest. Do not forget about the hardware, operating systems, applications, networks, and other integral parts. Discuss the threats in your classmates' posts.

Answer 1

Network virtualization has become increasingly prominent in recent years. It enables the creation of network infrastructures that are specifically tailored to the needs of distinct network applications and supports the instantiation of favorable environments for the development and evaluation of new architectures and protocols. Despite the wide applicability of network virtualization, the shared use of routing devices and communication channels leads to a series of security-related concerns. It is necessary to provide protection to virtual network infrastructures in order to enable their use in real, large scale environments. In this paper, we present an overview of the state of the art concerning virtual network security. We discuss the main challenges related to this kind of environment, some of the major threats, as well as solutions proposed in the literature that aim to deal with different security aspects. Malware is becoming smarter and stealthier and it is increasingly widespread over a large number of heterogeneous platforms. Most often, malicious software is especially built for a given target environment as it leverages its peculiarities. However, many similarities exist among malicious approaches. Such common features can be used to prevent, detect and react to such threat. This chapter discusses the above introduced threat and shows how advanced virtualization technology (quite common on most multicore CPU architectures) can be of help in monitoring, analyzing and protecting heterogeneous software/hardware architectures from malware