A cloud administrator is deprovisioning a virtual machine (VM) that was used to process sensitive financial data. The underlying physical server hosts multiple VMs from different clients. The administrator needs to ensure that no data from the deprovisioned VM can be accessed by the next VM allocated to the same physical memory space. Which of the following vulnerabilities should be the administrator's PRIMARY concern to mitigate?
The correct answer is resource reuse. This vulnerability occurs when a resource, such as a physical memory block, is not properly sanitized before being reallocated. In this scenario, remnants of the sensitive financial data could remain in memory (a concept known as data remanence) and become accessible to the next VM that uses that same memory space. VM escape is an attack where a process breaks out of a VM and interacts with the host OS, which is a different threat. Buffer overflow and race conditions are application-level vulnerabilities and are not the primary concern related to sanitizing shared hardware after deprovisioning a VM.
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What does 'sanitization' mean in the context of memory allocation?
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What are some examples of residual data that can be leaked through memory reuse?
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How does memory management in virtualized environments increase security risks?