tempnexus
Premium
join:1999-08-11
Boston, MA
| Does mounting a Virtual Hard Disk in VMware 6.5 exposes host
Does mounting a Virtual Hard Disk on the host in VMware 6.5 exposes the host to an attack?
Mostly I have two VM's running and I want to mount their drives so host can see them as "networked" drives (option in VMware 6.5) that way the host AV can scan the contents of those drives and find something that the VM AV might have missed (like a rootkit etc). However, does mounting those drives exposes the host? Or is it invisible to the VM? |
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JohnInSJ
Premium
join:2003-09-22
San Jose, CA
 ·SONIC.NET
| Lemme see if I understand the idea
1) shut down guest os
2) use diskmount to mount the disk(s) from guest onto host
3) scan disks with various tools to check for badness
4) unmount disk
5) restart guest
Nope, no risk as long as no one runs anything off that disk, or loads any files that may have malware into an app that can execute said mailware...
mounting noexec, nosuid wouldn't hurt, if the vmware mount tool can do that. If you're the only one on your machine, then you'll just have to restrain yourself 
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Mele20
Premium
join:2001-06-05
Hilo, HI
| reply to tempnexus
I take it you have an AV that does network scans? Avira Premium or Suite will not do this. So, I had to put Avira free on all my virtual machines instead of scanning them with Avira Premium from the host machine. NOD32 will do network scans and I don't know about others.
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tempnexus
Premium
join:1999-08-11
Boston, MA
edit:
October 7th, @04:59AM
| said by Mele20  :I take it you have an AV that does network scans? Avira Premium or Suite will not do this. So, I had to put Avira free on all my virtual machines instead of scanning them with Avira Premium from the host machine. NOD32 will do network scans and I don't know about others. Yeah I have one VM NOd32, 2nd VM Avira Free and the host KAV 2009.
I was wondering if the "mounted disks" can be accessed while the VM is up...hence the question of host vulnerability...since if they can then that is what my original question was about. I understand that when the VM is down then the danger of infection is virtually none, however if the VM is up I was wondering if the VM can see the host disks as well (when the host can see the VM disk). |
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