Secure inside VirtualBox

farmer.ro · Apprentice Joined: 20 Aug 2016 Posts: 179

I use VirtualBox on Gentoo ~amd64 system, and use it to boot a Gentoo Live DVD to browse dodgy websites, with the thought that if the Gentoo Live DVD gets compromised or owned by a possible exploit, its just as easy as closing and deleting the VirtualBox session.

compared to my host system, the Gentoo Live DVD seems to run older software, which would possibly make it more vulnerable;

i would like to know if that is true. and if true, what to do to make the VirtualBox session more secure...

qubix · Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2016 9:38 am Post subject:

what you can do is create another gentoo installation and sync it over to the virtualbox image everytime you want to use it. If anything gets installed on this system it will get deleted when the syncing is done.

On the other hand, I do not use any protection like that. When I see something fishy on a website, I just pull out very quickly

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qubix

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2016 10:21 am Post subject:

farmer.ro,

The Gentoo Live DVD is read only, providing you don't have its persistent mode on.
Therefore the Live DVD itself cannot get compromised. Thus any compromise lasts only as long as your session between boots.
That can be a very long time if you save the state of the VM rather than rebooting every time.

Maybe you want to boot Tin Hat Linux on the bare metal?
It runs entirely in RAM and has no way to access permanent storage. Its Gentoo based too.

You can't really protect yourself from dodgy websites so your original system design premise is flawed.
The biggest risk today is "social engineering". Gentoo can't protect you from that.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.