Mitigating the Hetzner/Linode XMPP.ru MitM interception incident

The provider has access to the host, they can just inspect the job from the outside and you won’t be able to tell

secure boot + virtualized memory encryption is supposed to prevent that, you'll have to trust intel/amd though.

Secure boot on a cloud machine is pretty useless, there's nothing stopping the hypervisor from injecting code into the running machine. Theoretically virtual machine memory is encrypted, but you'll just have to trust the hypervisor's word for it. You can try to verify the boot chain all the way to the hardware keys, but if the hypervisor just replaces your `JNE` with a `NOP` you'll have a hard time automating your protections.

I suppose you can transfer the keys out of the machine over the network (and hope the hypervisor doesn't replace the socket buffers just before transmission) and verify them off site, but guest machines will always be just that: guests on a host that has all the power.