Workstation Virtualization Security
The idea to this article came to mind a couple of days ago, but decided to post it today after listening to the following two (”the Malware Report”) Podcasts: Virtualization is Not Security and Virtualization: Security Risks You Must Know. Podcasts in which they threat a common misconception that virtual machines (even virtual firewalls) are more secure than normal machines.
While they treated virtualization aspect from a server point of view, virtualization can be useful for home/work users. How? By giving a hand in the most problematic/annoying problems – malware. A little link to Wikipedia about Virtualization.
Virtual Workstation
I see this approach as the less likely, but even so it is a good example of the principle. You install the OS you use for work (general usage) in the virtual machine, along with all the software/configuration it needs and in the end take a snapshot of it’s state. You conduct your work on the virtual machine with no threat upon your physical machine. And in the unfortunate situation of the virtual machine being crippled by a Malware you just restore the last snapshot as noting would have happened.
I recommend VirtualBox for creating/managing/working with virtual machines.
Data freezing (?)
Actually I just made up that term. I’m actually refering to hard drive virtualization, you know like DeepFreeze does (now you see from where I made up the term), not as secure as running in the virtual machine because there were exploits which circumvented the software by neutralizing it. But you shouldn’t be worried about that, such bugs disappear really fast, and the chance of getting a Malware which to exploit that are minimal; there was no such malware piece known till now.
Very useful to have in iCafes where people come and go, but malware stays. As mentioned before DeepFreeze does the job very well, but there is a freeware (for home usage) program which promises to do the same thing: Returnil.
Sandboxing
In computer security, a sandbox is a security mechanism for safely running programs. It is often used to execute untested code, or untrusted programs from unverified third-parties, suppliers and untrusted users. The sandbox typically provides a tightly-controlled set of resources for guest programs to run in, such as scratch space on disk and memory. Network access, the ability to inspect the host system or read from input devices are usually disallowed or heavily restricted. In this sense, sandboxes are a specific example of virtualization. (Wikipedia)
A common tool used for this job is Sandboxie, which I can say I am more than satisfied on it’s workings. Commonly this method of virtualization security will be the best, and the most accessible in terms of data sharing between virtual and physical environment.
