Be concerned with your privacy, if you use Xen-based VPS servers

Yesterday I worked on a Xen-based CentOS 5 VPS server. Out of curiosity how Xen stacks up against VMWare, I sniffed TCP traffic on the Xen virtual server, since I noticed VMWare guests can see the host’s traffic and vice versa. (More details can be found in my early post: Security Alert : bridged vmware guest can sniff host, guest peers, and vice versa)

I chose to sniff TCP/80 traffic this time, using tcpdump

tcpdump -w xenPeersHTTP.pcap -i eth0 -vv -N -n -nn tcp and port 80

  • assume my Xen VPS peers are mostly web servers - to reduce the chance of false negative, since it’d be easy to get enough packets if I can sniff them at all.
  • Less harm done (in terms eavesdropping), since whatever goes over plain-text HTTP (TCP/80) is fair game anyway.

To my surprise, the dump contains only session management packets, SYN, SYN+ACK, ACK, RST, FIN, FIN+ACK. None of the data packets were captured or seen. This apparently is better than what I found on VMWare guests. The latter can see data packets as well. So, the security implication for Xen-based VPS servers is more of a privacy concern.

Kinda interesting is, contrary to my initial assumption, the HTTP traffic is not inbound to my Xen VPS peers, but outbound to external web sites. Peer-or-not is determined by whether an IP addresses is in my own subnet.

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