This isn't "new" information, and many providers already wipe before reprovisioning space. Off the top of my head, I'm aware of three. The paper's sample size is frightfully small (VPS.NET, in particular, is not a shining star of cloud hosting). All you have to do to find out if this is the case is run this on new storage that you've requested from your provider:
strings /dev/<whatever>
This has nothing to do with "cloud", aside from rapidly reusing disks in that environment. This is the same problem with reusing disks in a datacenter, reusing disks at a dedicated host, reusing storage even inside a corporation, and so on. There is nothing "cloud-specific" about this in the slightest.
Of course, they wait until near the bottom of the paper to tell you that, so the title of the paper seems like a needless cloud scare which is really a shared-environment problem. Clueful people in hosting figured this out a while ago (publicly-used hosting has been around a long, long time). Long enough ago that you can measure how clueful your provider is by the usefulness of this trick.
The cloud angle is important because, as a cloud user, I have no control over the situation. More so, most people just expect the provider to take care of them as a result.
Regardless, it's why I'm willing to pay a little more for a company that will be proactive.
Comments
This isn't "new" information, and many providers already wipe before reprovisioning space. Off the top of my head, I'm aware of three. The paper's sample size is frightfully small (VPS.NET, in particular, is not a shining star of cloud hosting). All you have to do to find out if this is the case is run this on new storage that you've requested from your provider:
This has nothing to do with "cloud", aside from rapidly reusing disks in that environment. This is the same problem with reusing disks in a datacenter, reusing disks at a dedicated host, reusing storage even inside a corporation, and so on. There is nothing "cloud-specific" about this in the slightest.Of course, they wait until near the bottom of the paper to tell you that, so the title of the paper seems like a needless cloud scare which is really a shared-environment problem. Clueful people in hosting figured this out a while ago (publicly-used hosting has been around a long, long time). Long enough ago that you can measure how clueful your provider is by the usefulness of this trick.
The cloud angle is important because, as a cloud user, I have no control over the situation. More so, most people just expect the provider to take care of them as a result.
Regardless, it's why I'm willing to pay a little more for a company that will be proactive.