Sandboxed production clones¶

What?¶

A sandboxed production clone is an isolated, near-identical copy of a live production environment, used for:

• Safe testing of patches, updates, and security configurations

• Malware analysis without risking real systems

• Threat hunting using realistic traffic and logs

• Developer testing without breaking production

Unlike traditional staging environments, these clones:

• Mirror real data (anonymised if needed)

• Run in strict isolation (network segmentation, no outbound internet)

• Can be reset on-demand (snapshot-based)

How to build a sandboxed clone¶

Data extraction & sanitisation¶

Methods:

• Database dumps (MySQL, PostgreSQL) with PII scrubbing

• Virtual machine snapshots (VMware, Hyper-V, AWS AMIs)

• Containerised clones (Docker/Kubernetes with volume mounts)

Sanitisation Tools:

• Anonymisation: faker (Python), pg_anonymizer (PostgreSQL)

• Subset sampling: jq (JSON), csvkit (CSV)

# Example: Create a sanitised MySQL dump  
mysqldump --single-transaction production_db | \  
  sed 's/real_email@domain.com/test_user@example.org/g' > sanitised_db.sql  

Environment isolation¶

Network Controls:

• No internet access (iptables/nftables block outbound traffic)

• Private VLANs (separate from production)

• Host-based firewalls (allow only required ports)

Access Restrictions:

• Separate credentials (no production keys/secrets)

• Time-limited sessions (auto-expire after 4 hours)

Automated deployment¶

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Options:

Example AWS Clone Setup:

# Create a sandboxed VPC  
aws ec2 create-vpc --cidr-block 10.0.0.0/16 --tag-specifications 'ResourceType=vpc,Tags=[{Key=Name,Value=sandbox-clone}]'  

# Restrict outbound traffic  
aws ec2 create-security-group --group-name "sandbox-no-internet" --description "Block all egress" --vpc-id vpc-123  
aws ec2 revoke-security-group-egress --group-id sg-123 --ip-permissions '[{IpProtocol="-1", FromPort=-1, ToPort=-1, IpRanges=[{CidrIp="0.0.0.0/0"}]}]'  

Tooling recommendations¶

Implementation checklist¶

• Define data scope (full clone vs. subset)

• Implement network isolation (VLANs/firewalls)

• Automate deployment (IaC templates)

• Schedule regular resets (e.g., weekly snapshots)

• Audit access (who can spin up/down clones)

Example Reset Policy:

All sandbox clones must:  
1. Be destroyed after 7 days unless exempted  
2. Log all user activity (ssh, database queries)  
3. Block outbound internet by default  

Why this works¶

• Reduces production risks from untested changes

• Improves threat detection with realistic data

• Cost-effective (cloud instances can be paused when unused)