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Security considerations between Xen vs KVM? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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publication croisée depuis : https://lemmy.world/post/16156662

To be completely open, this is not a question about XCP-ng vs Proxmox. I'm open to doing everything in the cli, comparing two platforms is not my intention here.

I'm very interested in the security benefits one has over the other though. AFAIK Xen has a dedicated for security? I'd like to think that both are reasonably secure by default, but I do not get many hits for "KVM hardening", for example, only OS-level hardening advice.

Do both protect equally against attacks that try to escape the VM? Is there anything in terms of security that one has and the other doesn't?

I know this is not the usual kind of question that is asked on this sub, any help is greatly appreciated!

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (2 children)

From the FAQ of Qubes OS (i.e. most secure desktop OS for general use):

"Why does Qubes use Xen instead of KVM or some other hypervisor?"

"In short: we believe the Xen architecture allows for the creation of more secure systems (i.e. with a much smaller TCB, which translates to a smaller attack surface). We discuss this in much greater depth in our Architecture Specification document."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Searching for "XenTCB" already brings a lot of useful results

TCB
breaking up Hypervisors into smaller parts
Xen 4.11 release info
TCB overview
[scientific paper about some more stuff])https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-3-319-11203-9_18.pdf)
security in a commodity hypervisor

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Thanks!

[+] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I'm just being a bit paranoid with my attempts, and yes just KVM on Debian would work perfectly fine for my purposes but I'd like to take the more secure alternative if possible. Another comment about kernel hardening was a good one for KVM, and unfortunately AMD SEV is not available on most of their consumer chips (especially the older generations).

If I were to switch off multi-threading but assign vCPUs to my VM assuming multi-threaded capacity (I.e. assign 12 vCPUs to my lab cluster after switching of SMT for my 6 core CPU), would I face performance issues? I wonder

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

As KVM is part if the Linux kernel, I assume you'll have to look into kernel hardening instead, next to OS hardening. Hardware is also important to consider when talking about VM escaping. A CPU that supports better VM isolation features and encrypted memory

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Thanks, that's a great idea and I'll keep CPU support in mind