19.3. Default features for virtual machine security
In addition to manual means of improving the security of your virtual machines, listed in Best practices for securing virtual machines, a number of security features are provided by the libvirt software suite and are automatically enabled when using virtualization in RHEL 10. These include:
- System and session connections
The access all the available utilities for virtual machine management on a RHEL 10 host, you need to use the system connection of
libvirt(qemu:///system). To do so, you must have root privileges on the system or be a part of the libvirt user group.Non-root users that are not in the libvirt group can only access a session connection of
libvirt(qemu:///session), which has to respect the access rights of the local user when accessing resources.For details, see User-space connection types for virtualization.
- Virtual machine separation
- Individual VMs run as isolated processes on the host, and rely on security enforced by the host kernel. Therefore, a VM cannot read or access the memory or storage of other VMs on the same host.
- QEMU sandboxing
- A feature that prevents QEMU code from executing system calls that can compromise the security of the host.
- Kernel Address Space Randomization (KASLR)
- Enables randomizing the physical and virtual addresses at which the kernel image is decompressed. Thus, KASLR prevents guest security exploits based on the location of kernel objects.