SECURELY PERSISTING INFORMATION ACROSS SYSTEM REBOOTS

Securely persisting transient data between virtual machine restarts or VM migrations involves terminating, by a first virtual machine (102), VM, during a shutdown process for the first VM (102), execution of user-space processes on the first VM (102), writing, by a first agent (114A) executing on the first VM (102), protected data (118) from transient memory (104A) of the first VM (102) to a virtual disk (142) accessible by the first VM (102) and shutting down the first VM (102). The process also involves initiating a startup process of a second VM (102), the second VM (102) mounting the virtual disk (142); and executing, at the second VM (102) and prior to execution of user-space processes, a second agent (114B), the second agent (114B) being configured to: read the protected data (118) from the virtual disk (142) into transient memory (104B) of the second VM (102); and delete the protected data (118) from the virtual disk (142).