Virtualization Security (Part 1)

Every technology brings its own security challenges. Virtualization is no different. In this series, I present a summary of virtualization from NIST publication SP800-125

Let's start off with understanding different kinds of Virtualization. Mainly, we can categorize virtualization as follows:

1. Application Virtualization: It is a virtual implementation of an API that allows applications to run across different platforms without modifications. JVM is an example of this type.

2. Operating System Virtualization: It provides a virtual implementation of the OS interface where each application can run in a separate VM container.

3. Full (hypervisor) Virtualization: One or more OSs and the applications they contain are run on top of virtual hardware. Each instance of an OS runs in a separate VM called a guest operating system. The guest OSs on a host are managed by the hypervisor, also called the virtual machine monitor (VMM).

This link has a pictorial view of full and operating system virtualization.

NIST publication SP800-125 focuses on full virtualization. In next part, I'll start looking into details of full virtualization.