openstack team mailing list archive

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 01:44:53PM -0700, Matt Joyce wrote:
> As far as storage is concerned, certainly a cloud storage environment
> could be leveraged to store pre-encrypted data in such a way that
> would make it difficult bordering on impossible to seize or access
> without the consent of the owner.
> 
> As far as compute hosts are concerned, it is a whole different matter.
> 
> For the foreseeable future ( barring the invention of new widely
> distributed in CPU technology ) .  Anyone with ring 0 execution access
> on a system ( ie root / sudo ) will be able to pull data from a
> running instance pretty much no matter what you do.

I know, I didn't claim otherwise. If the VM is running on a host,
you should assume the host admin has access to anything. It does
however protect you against access from hosts where the VM is *not*
running, because those won't have been given a copy of the decryption
keys. IMHO disk encryption is a very valuable feature to reduce the
risk of data compromise in a cloud environment.

Daniel
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