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Thank you for the wonderful comment. I am talking about the operating system (Debian vs CentOS if I remember correctly) when I mention Hardening.
I haven't seen a concrete example of anyone applying CIS policies on the XCP-NG base, neither have I seen any mentions of securing the XCP-NG base by companies using them in production. I understand that having a walled-off
dom0is great and I like that about Xen, but not seeing dialogue on base OS level security is making me a bit uncomfortable about XCP-NG. Not sure if it is immutable, if it is then that would relieve some of my worries.Personally, I think Proxmox is somewhat unsecure too. I believe something like following relevant STIG recommendations, kernel self-protection, hardened malloc and other things (there's a huge list but I'll be brief) should be essential. Ideally I would've preferred that the Proxmox project took some of the measures that the Kicksecure project does in hardening debian but I don't see any mention of something like that. If I end up wanting to run Proxmox, I'll install Debian, distro-morph it to Kicksecure and then follow the instructions for Proxmox (not sure how I'll keep from using the Proxmox custom kernel but we'll see).
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 calledopenvswitch.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 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.
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
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.
I see. But does the installation cover hardening steps like hardened_malloc, permission hardener, kernel self-protection etc?
I don't think so, now. You'll have to do those yourself.
Ah, sucks