Alpha Security Matters

The Alpha computer was considered more secure and reliable than other environments.

For this reason potential customers frowned upon running a virtual Alpha on top of a foreign operating system like Windows or Linux. This is perceived as not reliable/secure enough and the virtual Alpha has in fact no control over that foreign environment.

One of the design goals of vtAlpha was to maintain the secure and reliable status of the Alpha and avoid the vulnerability issues a foreign operating system introduces.

By embedding the Operating System Functions and Peripheral Drivers into the vtAlpha product it exercises  full control over the host environment it runs on, while preventing foreign influences that can compromise the reliability and security of your virtual Alpha.

This is an important protection by design, but there are other security holes to watch out for.

To connect the Alpha and x86 worlds and to allow the virtual Alpha’s to make optimal use of the modern hardware, adding some management capabilities for the virtual Alpha environment was inevitable.

Everything is protected by user-id password of course or sometimes by physical access, but management over the network is preferable and therefore included. Unfortunately the network is always an area where you can screw up your security, so we paid extra attention to that.

By default vtAlpha opens up the following network ports only:

As a system manager you can also choose to open other network ports, for example to support console line access over the network. vtAlpha offers extra protection for your console lines.

For good security you should always use HTTPS to handle the remote management via vtMonitor, protecting the information exchange between the system manager and the vtAlpha host system.
So try to not use the HTTP protocol.

Access to the vtMonitor tool is protected by user-id password.

Use FTP and SMB wisely, having them active at all times is in fact a potential security hole.