Penetration Testing mailing list archives
Re: ESX Vmware Physically connected to different segments
From: Dave Howe <David.Howe () ansgroup co uk>
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 23:46:00 +0000
Albert R. Campa wrote:
We have some admins setting up some VMs on an ESX server and they have the idea of setting up 1host server with multiple VMs and on some of these VMs they want physical NICs connected to our main LAN and other VMs they want physical wires connected to a DMZ lan.Normally this would be almost bridging the two networks and bad practice overall. An explanation from an SA is that virtual switches are used on the ESX host and this seperates the physical connectionto our main LAN and this DMZ lan.This does not sound like good practice but is there documentation to back that up or in your experience have you been able to exploit thistype of configuration?
I would consider this no better or worse than sharing a single physical switch with vlans in different domains - if the core os could be compromised, it would bridge across the security domains, but the same would be true of a firewall device between the two (which is after all convention) - apart from the fact that I doubt ESX is designed as a security device. I would be more concerned that the techniques for detecting that the os is inside an emulated (VMWare) environment, and the extensions used by the VMware tools, could be exploited to run code on the native cpu.No direct reason to expect this is true, but similarly, no direct reason to believe it is impossible either.
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Current thread:
- Re: ESX Vmware Physically connected to different segments, (continued)
- Re: ESX Vmware Physically connected to different segments Dave Howe (Jan 30)
- Re: ESX Vmware Physically connected to different segments Kurt Buff (Jan 28)
- Re: ESX Vmware Physically connected to different segments David M. Zendzian (Jan 29)
- RE: ESX Vmware Physically connected to different segments Loupe, Jeffrey J (Jan 29)
- Re: ESX Vmware Physically connected to different segments Kurt Buff (Jan 29)
- RE: ESX Vmware Physically connected to different segments Loupe, Jeffrey J (Jan 29)
- Re: ESX Vmware Physically connected to different segments Enno Rey (Jan 29)
- RE: ESX Vmware Physically connected to different segments Jeff Norem (Jan 28)