5 ms·

Forgive me as I don't know xen that well, but... Couldn't they just make a copy of the vm, isolate it, and then break into that one? sure the data will be "old

• Johnny555 9y ago
  That only gives them the data that's in-flight and already decrypted for processing, but any security conscious company will have their data segmented into many sections that are broken up into smaller pieces with their contents encrypted separately with a decryption key that's stored in a hardware HSM. If they want to capture the entire data stream, they'll need to capture it in real-time.
  • CaptSpify 9y ago
    A) I think you way overestimate the security practices of most companies. I have no knowledge of WM's practices. B) That's likely still going to be a large amount of very usable data
    • Johnny555 9y ago
      Having worked at a bank that was moving some workloads to the cloud, I don't think I'm underestimating the security practices of companies that consider their company data to be valuable. In the application I was working on, they had over a TB of data, broken up into 32MB blocks, each with a unique key that had to be unwrapped by the HSM. If you stole the VM you'd get only a few blocks of readable data with it. I assume that if Walmart values this data, they'll take similar precautions in the cloud.
      • CaptSpify 9y ago
        I'm not saying that there aren't companies that are responsible with their data. I'm saying I really disbelieve that the majority of companies treat their data this way. There's too many fly-by-night shops. My point though, is that the attack is definitely feasible. I think WM has every right to be concerned.