Failure Pattern: Cloned VMs Share Identity in Ways Attackers Exploit
Cloud VMs reuse certificates, metadata, and even disk images. Attackers use clones to masquerade as legitimate systems.
What We See in the Field
A malicious VM clone registers as a trusted system. Monitoring tools cannot distinguish clone from the original. Attackers leverage cloned trust to move inside the environment.
Underlying Causes
Certificate reuse
Disk image duplication
Identity tied to metadata
Blind trust in cloned instances
No hardware-bound identity enforcement
Trust-Native Network Resolution
DTL binds identity to a workload’s cryptographic fingerprint rather than metadata or disks. Cloned VMs cannot impersonate originals.
Broken Trust Assumption
This failure pattern has played out repeatedly in real security incidents—not because of missing tools, but because of how trust is assigned.
In breaches such as SolarWinds, Capital One, Okta, and MOVEit, attackers did not bypass security controls. They operated through them, using valid identities, trusted credentials, signed code, and encrypted sessions. Security systems accepted these signals as proof of legitimacy, allowing malicious behavior to proceed.
The common thread across these incidents is structural: identity was assumed based on trust signals, not proven at the moment of execution.