VLAN hopping, ARP Poisoning and Man-In-The-Middle Attacks in Virtualized Environments

Cloud service providers offer their customers the ability to deploy virtual machines in a multi-tenant environment. These virtual machines are typically connected to the physical network via a virtualized network configuration. This could be as simple as a bridged interface to each virtual machine or as complicated as a virtual switch providing more robust networking features such as VLANs, QoS, and monitoring. At DEF CON 23, we presented how attacks known to be successful on physical switches apply to their virtualized counterparts. Here, we present new results demonstrating successful attacks on more complicated virtual switch configurations such as VLANs. In particular, we demonstrate VLAN hopping, ARP poisoning and Man-in-the-Middle attacks across every major hypervisor platform. We have added more hypervisor environments and virtual switch configurations since our last disclosure, and have included results of attacks originating from the physical network as well as attacks originating in the virtual network.

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