this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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23
XCP-NG vs PROXMOX security hardening? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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It's been a while since I visited this topic, but a few years back, Xen (and by extension XCP-NG) was better known for security whilst KVM (and thus Proxmox) was considered for better performance (yes, I've heard of the rumours of AWS moving to KVM from Xen for some appliances).

I would like to ask the community about the security measures you've taken to harden the default PROXMOX and XCP-NG installations. Have you run the CIS benchmarks and performed hardening that way? Did you enable 2FA?

I'm also interested in people who run either of these in production: what steps did you take? Did you patch the Debian base (for PVE)/Fedora base (I think, for XCP)?

Thank you for responding!

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[–] moonpiedumplings 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Personally, I think Proxmox is somewhat unsecure too.

Proxmox is unique from other projects, in it's much more hacky, and much of the stack is custom rather than standards. Like for example: For networking, they maintain a fork of the Linux's older networking stack, called ifupdown2, whereas similar projects, like openstack, or Incus, use either the standard Linux kernel networking, or a project called openvswitch.

I think Proxmox is definitely secure enough, but I don't know if I would really trust it for higher value usecases due to some of their stack being custom, rather than standard and mantained by the wider community.

If I end up wanting to run Proxmox, I’ll install Debian, distro-morph it to Kicksecure

If you're interested in deploying a hypervisor on top of an existing operating system, I recommend looking into Incus or Openstack. They have packages/deployments than can be done on Debian or Red Hat distros, and I would argue that they are designed in a more secure manner (since they include multi tenancy) than Proxmox. In addition to that, they also use standard tooling for networking, like both can use Linux Bridge (in-kernel networking) for networking operations.

I would trust Openstack the most when it comes to security, because it is designed to be used as a public cloud, like having your own AWS, and it is deployed with components publicly accessible in the real world.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I had looked into openstack a while back but left it thinking it was too complex. I was looking at Apache's Cloudstack then.

I see now that a contributor has got Debian in the official list of supported distributions. Which means my distro-morphing idea should work in theory with OpenStack. This is a great idea, thanks. I will look at OpenStack more seriously now. Does look like it will need some effort though

[–] moonpiedumplings 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Which means my distro-morphing idea should work in theory with OpenStack

I also don't recommend doing a manual install though, as it's extremely complex compared to automated deployment solutions like kolla-ansible (openstack in docker containers), openstack-ansible (host os/lxc containers), or openstack-helm/genestack/atmosphere (openstack on kubernetes). They make the install much more simpler and less time consuming, while still being intensely configurable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I see. But does the installation cover hardening steps like hardened_malloc, permission hardener, kernel self-protection etc?

[–] moonpiedumplings 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I don't think so, now. You'll have to do those yourself.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Ah, sucks