VM Snapshot Mounting for Isolated Ransomware Recovery Testing
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing data management systems face challenges in efficiently and reliably recovering virtual machines (VMs) from ransomware attacks by facilitating effective investigation and recovery procedures in isolated testing environments, while minimizing the risk of further malware spread and ensuring efficient data access.
Innovation Solution
A data management system (DMS) orchestrates the recovery of VMs into isolated testing environments, allowing live mounts of snapshot-based VMs for parallel investigation and recovery, enabling efficient querying and testing across multiple versions to identify the most reliable VMs for restoration to the production environment.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Speed
If VMs are recovered to production environment directly, then recovery speed is improved, but risk of malware spread increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the recovery process into two distinct phases: (1) parallel investigation and testing in isolated testing environments, and (2) selective recovery to production environment. This segmentation allows safety checks to be performed separately from the recovery operation, eliminating the trade-off between speed and safety.
Solution Approach 2:
Testing environments serve as intermediary sandboxed environments between the backup storage and production environment. VMs are first restored to these isolated testing environments where they can be investigated and tested for malware, then only clean VMs are promoted to production. This intermediary step acts as a safety buffer that prevents malware spread while maintaining efficient recovery.
2Reliability
If VMs are tested sequentially, then testing thoroughness is improved, but investigation time increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the testing workload across multiple parallel testing environments, allowing different VMs or different aspects of the same VM to be tested simultaneously rather than sequentially. This maintains thoroughness while reducing total investigation time.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary automated investigations and basic malware scans in the testing environments before full manual testing. This preliminary action filters out obviously infected VMs early, allowing researchers to focus thorough testing resources on suspicious cases, thereby maintaining reliability while reducing overall time.
3Productivity
If multiple VMs are investigated in parallel, then investigation efficiency is improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The testing environments are designed as universal sandboxed platforms that can handle multiple different VM types and workloads simultaneously using standardized interfaces and resource management. This multi-functionality allows parallel investigation of multiple VMs without proportionally increasing system complexity, as the same infrastructure serves multiple purposes.
Data Source
AI summary
A data management system (DMS) may facilitate an investigation procedure for a set of one or more virtual machines (VMs) hosted in a first environment. The DMS may receive an indication of a selection of one or more sets of VMs and corresponding snapshots for the investigation procedure. The corresponding snapshots may be stored in a second environment, and each snapshot may be associated with a version of a respective set of VMs. The DMS may mount the one or more sets of VMs to one or more testing environments different than the first and second environments. The mounting may use the snapshots stored in the second environment to provide the testing environments with query access to respective versions of the sets of VMs hosted in the first environment. The DMS may perform query operations between the first environment and the testing environments as part of the investigation procedure.