Live Patching, Virtual Machine Introspection and Vulnerability Management: A Primer and Practical Guide

The talk covers several technologies and best practices to managing Security Vulnerabilities, which are told as interconnected stories. We will cover how the largest clouds in production came togeth …

The talk covers several technologies and best practices to managing Security Vulnerabilities, which are told as interconnected stories. We will cover how the largest clouds in production came together through the Xen Project to develop an industry leading open source security process to manage software vulnerabilities effectively, how those vendors collaborated to stop cloud reboots through Live Patching and how security and CPU vendors collaborated to protect against 0-day vulnerabilities and advanced persistent threats using hardware assisted virtual machine introspection. Finally, we will also provide information how you can use tools such as CVE Details to assess how secure an open source technology is relative to another, such that you don’t have to rely solely on security stories from the technology press. The talk will cover how these technologies work, the limitations and challenges which still remain and how they are used in practice using examples of Xen Project based products and installations. We will also cover how these technologies impact software vulnerability management processes and system administrators.