IVS: Infrastructure & Virtualization Security

Higher levels of assurance are required for protection, retention, and lifecycle management of audit logs, adhering to applicable legal, statutory or regulatory compliance obligations and providing unique user access accountability to detect potentially suspicious network behaviors and/or file integrity anomalies, and to support forensic investigative capabilities in the event of a security breach.

The provider shall ensure the integrity of all virtual machine images at all times. Any changes made to virtual machine images must be logged and an alert raised regardless of their running state (e.g., dormant, off, or running). The results of a change or move of an image and the subsequent validation of the image’s…

A reliable and mutually agreed upon external time source shall be used to synchronize the system clocks of all relevant information processing systems to facilitate tracing and reconstitution of activity timelines.

The availability, quality, and adequate capacity and resources shall be planned, prepared, and measured to deliver the required system performance in accordance with legal, statutory, and regulatory compliance obligations. Projections of future capacity requirements shall be made to mitigate the risk of system overload.

Implementers shall ensure that the security vulnerability assessment tools or services accommodate the virtualization technologies used (e.g., virtualization aware).

Network environments and virtual instances shall be designed and configured to restrict and monitor traffic between trusted and untrusted connections. These configurations shall be reviewed at least annually, and supported by a documented justification for use for all allowed services, protocols, ports, and by compensating controls.

Each operating system shall be hardened to provide only necessary ports, protocols, and services to meet business needs and have in place supporting technical controls such as: antivirus, file integrity monitoring, and logging as part of their baseline operating build standard or template.

Production and non-production environments shall be separated to prevent unauthorized access or changes to information assets. Separation of the environments may include: stateful inspection firewalls, domain/realm authentication sources, and clear segregation of duties for personnel accessing these environments as part of their job duties.

Multi-tenant organizationally-owned or managed (physical and virtual) applications, and infrastructure system and network components, shall be designed, developed, deployed, and configured such that provider and customer (tenant) user access is appropriately segmented from other tenant users, based on the following considerations: Established policies and procedures Isolation of business critical assets and/or sensitive user data, and…

Secured and encrypted communication channels shall be used when migrating physical servers, applications, or data to virtualized servers and, where possible, shall use a network segregated from production-level networks for such migrations.

Access to all hypervisor management functions or administrative consoles for systems hosting virtualized systems shall be restricted to personnel based upon the principle of least privilege and supported through technical controls (e.g., two-factor authentication, audit trails, IP address filtering, firewalls, and TLS encapsulated communications to the administrative consoles).

Policies and procedures shall be established, and supporting business processes and technical measures implemented, to protect wireless network environments, including the following: Perimeter firewalls implemented and configured to restrict unauthorized traffic Security settings enabled with strong encryption for authentication and transmission, replacing vendor default settings (e.g., encryption keys, passwords, and SNMP community strings) User access…

Network architecture diagrams shall clearly identify high-risk environments and data flows that may have legal compliance impacts. Technical measures shall be implemented and shall apply defense-in-depth techniques (e.g., deep packet analysis, traffic throttling, and black-holing) for detection and timely response to network-based attacks associated with anomalous ingress or egress traffic patterns (e.g., MAC spoofing and…