Originally Posted by
nkedel
It won't give full protection, but I think you underestimate the utility of layered protection; a lot of things will be blocked by a combination of very low-tech measures (DNS proxy or hosts file, ad-blocking, click-to-play on plugins, user account control.) Some won't, but why not get the easy stuff the easy way?
Yeah, definitely not getting a reboot in there. Locking the machine and requiring her to log in as herself is probably practical, though.
There comes a point of diminishing returns. My goal is to protect my system, not so limit her options that the likelihood of malware damage is zero. As I said, she's not a mischievous child, bent on clicking on everything and anything just to see what happens. I think there are two primary threats resulting from her use: drive-by malware, and websites that put up a fake, "click here to close this box." Though I suspect there is malware out there that can get around a VM, I doubt that most of it can, and that which might is going to be concerned with identity theft rather than malicious destruction (I don't have computer-controlled centrifuges for enriching uranium
).
In essence; the main advantage would be for her that there isn't an initial required step of going through the OS to get to her stuff. I wonder whether, with a separate user account, you could have her login go straight into the VM with one of Virtual PC or VirtualBox or VMWare Player.
I really don't think this is necessary. Right now, she clicks on the FireFox icon when she wants to surf. With the VM, she'll click on the "Start" icon in Fences box with her name on it.
More general advantages of hypervisors are that the performance is often better, and the flexibility with which you can assign the underlying hardware to the VMs are often greater. These would be bigger advantages in your case if (for example) you were running your own instance in parallel with hers.
Whoa! Under no circumstances will I work in a VM. A lot of what I do is extremely CPU-intensive (that's why I bought my Uber Laptoppenstein). I'm not going to take a performance hit in the interest of perfect security (which, we all agree I think, is an oxymoron anyway).
The main thing with my original suggestion is that there's no outer OS environment for her to get caught in, or to muck up. If she's amenable enough to using the VM environment without being forced into it, that may not matter.
That's the point -- I don't want to "force" her into anything. She's not going to go through my machines, deleting software, changing user permissions, overwriting the MBR, or, for that matter, installing software of questionable provenance, etc. She is going to visit websites that sound interesting to her but, nonetheless, are malicious and will attempt to install malware, either as a drive-by or through social engineering. The VM handles that.
Off the top of my, head every VM environment I'm aware of that will run on a PC is available in a free-as-in-beer edition, with commercial/supported up-sells you're unlikely to care about.
If you care about FOSS, VirtualBox is available in an Open Source edition. It's somewhat more flexible than VirtualPC or the (free) version of VMWare Player. It's somewhat less flexible than VMWare workstation.
One trick which used to work nicely was to get a free 30-day trial of VMWare workstation to enable features in your saved vm that aren't enabled in VMWare Player, then just use VMWare player once the setup is the way you want it.
Oh,
https://www.virtualbox.org/
I think, though, that Windows Virtual PC will do the job -- why go to the trouble?
Once again, there's the whole his/hers environment thing you've got going: just because she might be using it to browse (and do other stuff) more securely doesn't mean you need to know more about it than is necessary to set it up for her.
Perhaps that's true. I'm still uncomfortable with the idea.
It's also really dead easy to understand what's under the hood, compared to Windows.
I've been using Windows, in some form, since 3.1.1 (the lack of networking in 3.1 made it a non-starter for me). Of necessity, given all of the quirks, bugs and idiosyncrasies of the OS, I've learned enough about it to build and maintain my own machines which, themselves, have some rather arcane configurations given what I use them for. As I said, "Damn it, Jim! I'm a lawyer, not a software engineer!"
Well, that rules out the Mac Mini (which until more recently when there were some decent USFF PCs from other people, was the one Mac model I was attracted to for running non-Apple OSes on.)
Once you're running the MacOS unlicensed on a PC, you're running it unlicensed on a PC -- doesn't make much sense to have paid for it. I have on very good account that it runs well in VirtualBox.
Well, it's a matter of principal. We have iPods because they're unique products -- no other MP3 players have 160 gig hard drives that let you take your entire music collection with you. Otherwise, there are no Apple products in this house, and there never will be, absent another similar entirely unique product.
Sounds like she's pretty patient of a slow browsing experience, and a P4 would be pretty bad on the electrical bill, but (ignoring the cost issue) sound like the Celeron NUC wouldn't be a bad way to go.
Well, there's that money thing again (and the space thing). Also, though I've only mentioned it in passing, my primary computer has $800 near-field monitors and a subwoofer. If I was so inclined, I could mix and master studio-quality CDs with this system, and the CDs that I do mix and master are close enough to studio quality that only a true audiophile or audio engineer would be able to hear the difference. I once left a CD from one of the shows that I'm writing in our home theater system and Mrs. PTravel played it without realizing what it was. When I came home she told me that she didn't know I had recorded an album back when I was an actor.
Mrs. PTravel is a jazz fan and likes to preview CDs that she buys on-line, and also to research performers we may want to go see live. There is absolutely no way that even a very good set of computer speakers is going to approach the quality of the near-fields, and Mrs. PTravel WILL notice the difference.
Here's an idea: what about setting up a VM on a different machine, wired outside the main firewall, and having her use remote desktop from your machine to get to it?
Oy. Remote Desktop, and other better variants, live VNC, are slow, slow, slow. I use VNC to control the thin clients on my network -- it's fine for them as all I do with them is check on the status of the programs they're running. I also use it to install updates on my media computer in the living room (and to shut it off in case my wife forgets to do so when she's watching NetFlix). If I had to use a remote solution for all my computing, it would drive me insane and, no doubt, would do the same for Mrs. PTravel (not to mention that she likes to looks a web-hosted videos).
If your wiring is all gigabit, she should be able to still watch videos on it... then the only traffic you have to worry about is the single RDP port outbound from the machine she's accessing it from.
All my wiring (and switches and router) is gigabit. However, video is simply too much data, particularly when there are other traffic-intensive applications running, e.g. the mirroring of the two NASes is done with a thin client-based backup program.
As an added plus, she'd be able to get to her browsing/etc environment not just from your one desktop, but from any of your other machines.
The only other machine she'd ever use is the media computer in the living room, and that runs over a 500 meg power-line link (which actually gives closer to 300 meg). It does work fine for Netflix and HBOgo, but I can't see her hunched over the coffee table trying to browse with it. She will NEVER touch my music computer -- that's my security system for THAT machine
-- though it wouldn't be practical for her to do so, as it's set up with my (piano) keyboard and she'd have to sit at the piano bench to use it. There's a media computer in my bedroom (a retired laptop), the two thin clients that run the FTP server, the MagicJack phone server, the NAS mirroring and a couple of other things, my laptop, the laptop that I gave her, and another retired laptop that, if I ever get the damn thing configured, will run FreePBX. Most of the computers on my LAN are busy doing things on their own and aren't intended for users.
Sounds like Linux (either Ubuntu or Chrome OS) might be a great choice
Chrome OS sounds interesting, only because I doubt there's much malware written for it. However, as I mentioned, I want to get my wife used to working in a more "office normal" computing environment.
Any of the VM software will run Linux, including VirtualPC although it's not ideal for it. I mostly use VirtualBox, which is free (depending on which features you use, either as in beer, or open-source) and dead easy.
I previously had VirtualBox installed on my primary machine though, at this moment, I don't why I installed it. Oh, wait, I do remember. I have a couple of HP Touchpads with cyanogenmod Android installed on them. The initial install required installing the HP SDK on my computer and that, in turn, required VirtualBox.
GUIs are fungible. If someone doesn't get the basic concept enough to understand that the basic metaphors are there, and that they can go from Linux to Windows XP to Windows 7 to Mac interchangeably, they need to work on the basics, but once they have the basics any WIMP UI should be usable.
I can, but the differences are enough that it would confuse Mrs. PTravel. She's very resistant to learning the underlying concepts -- she just wants to do what she does and doesn't care how the computer does it.
Ditto, for that matter, the basics of office suites; pretty much all GUI word processors and spreadsheets work pretty much the same. An Office power user is more likely to notice the differences between LibreOffice than MS Office (or Office up to 2003 and Office 2007 and later, given the awful ribbon) than a duffer.
On this, I must disagree. I work in Word every single working day, and I'm familiar with the free alternatives. Though, for the most part, they're reasonable substitutes for Word, there are enough differences that make them impractical in a law office environment. As you noted, even just moving up through the various Word versions is painful enough (what in the world is Microsoft thinking, anyway?).
Once you're stuck needing office, you're pretty much stuck on Windows or Mac. You might see to what degree you can interchangeably use LibreOffice, but while it's fine for individual use IME the document interchange capabilities are not there.
I need very tight integration between Acrobat and Word, as well as with Excel and, to a lesser extent, PowerPoint. There's simply no way around Word at this point.
I've yet to get Netflix working on Linux, for the main example.
Will be stopped cold in the sense of "gone again when you blow away the VM," but if you can avoid her getting them in the first place, that's still work you're saving yourself.
It's easy enough to restore the VM from the backup. She's going to get malware as long as she keeps visiting Chinese sites.
In theory, it is possible to have privilege escalation attacks out of a VM onto the underlying host system. In practice, I'm not aware of any working yet in the wild, and if there were, it would probably be aimed at large cloud infrastructure things ("I break into someones AWS instance, try to get into Amazon's infrastructure from there") and not individuals futzing with VirtualPC/VirtualBox/VMWare workstation on their own systems.
That's what I think, too. Why would a hacker (or Russian syndicate) go to the trouble?
That may change if later Win8.x moves to more Hyper-V-based sandboxing (like some of the BYOD proposals where work apps are a segregated VM) but even there, it's far from clear whether any attack would be general as opposed to specific to Hyper-V.
I have one machine on which I installed Win8, just to see what it was. Though I have it configured to boot into "classic" Win7 mode, and use that app, the name of which escapes me at the moment, that restores the Start button, and it DOES run pretty quick on the wimpy netbook on which I installed it, I have absolutely no plans to upgrade any of my machines to Win8, which offers no significant advantages to me at all.
BTW, I'd be terribly curious for a picture of the work room.
Have you seen the pictures of the Oklahoma tornado damage?