Investigating the Security of Nexus 1000V Virtual Switches in VMware ESXi Hypervisors
Raymond A. Hansen, Benjamin Peterson, Timothy Becker · 2016
In this paper, the security posture of two versions of the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch is tested against a set of exploits known to be valid on physical switching infrastructure. Specifically, the Nexus 1000V as implemented with VMware's ESXi hypervisor is examined. The attempted exploits are CAM table overflows, VLAN hopping, Spanning Tree manipulation, ARP poisoning, and Private VLAN attacks. With the exception of Spanning Tree manipulation, the Nexus 1000V is vulnerable to all of the attacks in at least one of the tested release combinations. This leads to a call for additional security considerations when deploying the Nexus 1000V/ESXi combination in data centers and cloud provider networks as intended by their design.