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Securing VMs: Security Through Purity — Bypassing the Red Queen (saucelabs.com)
12 points by brainsik 5375 days ago
2 comments

It's a little bit alarming that Sauce Labs even considered any strategy other than pristine VMs for everyone. The dangers outlined in their article should be immediately obvious to everyone.

Maybe it was immediately obvious to Sauce, but they thought it was worth an article anyway, just for the PR value.

As the author of the article, I agree, it should be obvious. Unfortunately, the security implications of a service like ours is less appreciated by the general user community. Today, there are other services similar to Sauce Scout you can try where you'll see VMs getting reused and sometimes even catch a glimpse of the previous browser session. So we thought it would be helpful to outline our approach and why it matters.
I'd love to know more about how they cold boot cloud Windows VMs in under 40 seconds. EC2 doesn't provide suspend/resume (at least last time I looked.)