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hsbauauvhabzblast Wednesday at 10:59 PM2 repliesview on HN

Virtual machines are treated as a security boundary despite the fact that with enough R&D they are not. Hosting minecraft servers in virtual machines is fine, but not a great idea if they’re cohosted on a machine that has billions of dollars in crypto or military secrets.

Docker is pretty much the same but supposedly more flimsy.

Both have non-obvious configuration weaknesses that can lead to escapes.


Replies

kevinrineerlast Thursday at 5:12 PM

> Virtual machines are treated as a security boundary despite the fact that with enough R&D they are not. Hosting minecraft servers in virtual machines is fine, but not a great idea if they’re cohosted on a machine that has billions of dollars in crypto or military secrets.

While I generally agree with the technical argument, I fail to see the threat model here. Is it that some external threat would have prior knowledge that an important target is in close proximity to a less hardened one? It doesn't seem viable to me for nation states to spend the expensive R&D to compromise hobbyist-adjacent services in a hope that they can discover more valuable data on the host hypervisor.

Once such expensive malware is deployed, there's a huge risk that all the R&D money is spent on potentially just reconnaissance.

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hoppplast Wednesday at 11:32 PM

Yeah but why would somebody co-host military secrets or billions of dollars? Its a bit of a stretch

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