Experimental Proof: Data Remanence in Cloud VMs

Data security is one of the main concerns organizations have when implementing cloud computing. In particular, data leakage issues in public clouds have been widely studied. Data remanence is considered a major threat, as residual data may include sensitive information like user names, passwords, encryption keys, URLS, etc. However, until now little if any experimental evidence has been put forward supporting the existence and extent of such threat in commercial cloud VMs. In this paper, we provide experimental proof of the remanence of data in VM memory and hard disk. Our experimental design is repeatable and suitable for inclusion in assurance testing and certification suites.