It's very hard with posts like this to understand the true reach of the problem: is this like having ssh with "password" as the password or is it something much less dangeroues. Is this something that could be exploited without Amazon team messing with the hypervisor providing your VM or something a third party can exploit? If this is a problem with Amazon then I think it's not a real problem for many people: it's inevitable to have a trust contract with them, it's pretty much essential to the notion of the cloud. They could be effectively violating their physical security rules for employees and installing modified code on the hypervisor but they still give us hints and certifications as to why that's not the reason and we need to choose to pick that or not. I just wanted to ask because I'm not an expert on this at all and I always find myself asking, how bad is this indeed and under what assumptions is it a security problem? Any hints to understand this are much appreciated! :)