Re: RAM security

[Jonathan Tripathy <jonnyt@abpni.co.uk>]

Would one way around this be to disable ballooning in the DomUs?

At the minute, only my Dom0 can be ballooned, all DomU have a fixed 
memory size. Is this sufficient?

Thanks


On 06/12/10 14:49, George Dunlap wrote:
> I looked into this sometime this last year.  I believe the answer is
> "no": the domain destruction routines will zero memory before handing
> it back to Xen.
>
> One potential data leak, however (last time I looked at this), is that
> Xen does not scrub memory handed back by the balloon driver.  So if
> the guest OS hasn't scrubbed it, and it contains sensitive
> information, it may end up being assigned to another domain as-is
> (either via ballooning or start-of-day domain creation).  At the
> moment that's considered the guest's responsibility.
>
>   -George
>
> On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 2:35 PM, Jonathan Tripathy<jonnyt@abpni.co.uk>  wrote:
>> Hi Everyone,
>>
>> In Xen, is a DomU able to access data in RAM which a previous DomU has
>> stored in the past, but didn't "zero" it?
>>
>> I understand that this is a problem with physical disks (using phy:/), just
>> wondering if the same stands with RAM
>>
>> Thanks
>>
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