IBM recently made available another Blueprint of my authorship: Securing KVM guests and the host system.

The text, which also has a PDF version, brings a couple of steps and some discussion around the theme of KVM Security for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on IBM System x with Virtualization capability. Those include remote management aspects, host and guest security, a few suggestions for auditing and why not some image-at-rest cryptography?

The complete index follows:

• Introduction
• Securing KVM guests and the host system
  • Secured KVM remote management
  • Setting up secure remote management
  • Remote management using SSH tunnels
  • Remote management using SASL authentication and encryption
  • Remote management using TLS
• Guest virtual network isolation options
  • Network port sharing with Ethernet bridges
  • Network port sharing using 802.1q VLANs
• Auditing the KVM virtualization host and guests
  • Audit rules file
• KVM guest image encryption
  • Using encryption in KVM guest images
  • Migrating existing guests to encrypted storage
  • Installing a new KVM guest
  • Storing encrypted guest images
• Appendix A. Sample audit rules file
• Appendix B. Troubleshooting

Feedback, comments, corrections and suggestions are welcome as always, and we now have a way to provide them directly in the text. Questions can be answered in the developerWorks Linux Security Community Forum.