Personally, I think Proxmox is somewhat unsecure too.
Proxmox is unique from other projects, in it's much more hacky, and much of the stack is custom rather than standards. Like for example: For networking, they maintain a fork of the Linux's older networking stack, called ifupdown2
, whereas similar projects, like openstack, or Incus, use either the standard Linux kernel networking, or a project called openvswitch
.
I think Proxmox is definitely secure enough, but I don't know if I would really trust it for higher value usecases due to some of their stack being custom, rather than standard and mantained by the wider community.
If I end up wanting to run Proxmox, I’ll install Debian, distro-morph it to Kicksecure
If you're interested in deploying a hypervisor on top of an existing operating system, I recommend looking into Incus or Openstack. They have packages/deployments than can be done on Debian or Red Hat distros, and I would argue that they are designed in a more secure manner (since they include multi tenancy) than Proxmox. In addition to that, they also use standard tooling for networking, like both can use Linux Bridge (in-kernel networking) for networking operations.
I would trust Openstack the most when it comes to security, because it is designed to be used as a public cloud, like having your own AWS, and it is deployed with components publicly accessible in the real world.
Joysticks on the bottom again... whyyyyy...
My hands find that setup so uncomfortable, I wish they would put them on the top.