Technologies are generally described for virtual machine memory deduplication protection through memory deduplication masking. In some examples, a virtual machine manager (VMM) that receives data to be written to memory may initially write the data to entries in a temporary shadow paging table and then subsequently opportunistically update the memory and an associated hardware-assisted paging (HAP) table. Upon receiving a read request for the received data before the data has been written to the memory, the VMM may check the HAP table and determine that the requested data is not available from the memory. Upon determining that the received data is not available from the memory, the VMM may respond to the read request by sending the received data stored in the shadow paging table entries.