Public PC Worries
Hi Fred, When I travel I use internet cafes to check e-mail, pay bills et cetera. As a security measure I usually reboot into Kanotix to conduct my business. I believe this to be the best way to be secure when using public access machines. Your thoughts?Is there anything else I could or should do? Regards, Stephen McVay
There's nothing--- literally nothing--- you can do to make an open, public connection truly secure. For example, there are *hardware* based loggers and sniffers that are invisible to any OS or security software; they could be installed on the PC, and you'd have no way of knowing, or bypassing them. You also have no idea what's going on in the "back room" of the establishment offering the public PC.
That said, yes, using a per-session OS that goes away when you do is much safer than using whatever's installed on the public PC already. But even there, if your copy of Linux creates directories/folders or temp files on the hard drive, you still may be leaving data behind.
I hate to beat a dead, er, puppy, but this is one of the things I really like about the "Puppy Linux" I've mentioned a lot lately ( http://www.puppyos.com/ ) When you boot it from a flash drive, it sets up a RAM drive on the host PC, and copies itself into RAM. Nothing's written to the hard drive. (And separately, but also importantly, nothing's interactively written to the flash drive. This makes things much faster, and also increases the life of the flash device by not needlessly consuming the device's finite number of write cycles.) When you exit Puppy Linux, the contents of RAM are copied back to the flash drive, and nothing's left behind on the host PC.
This approach doesn't prevent hardware-oriented sniffers and backroom shenanigans from snooping on you, but does eliminate the #1 problem with public PCs, which is data cached or otherwise left behind on the public system.
The only way to be completely safe on a public PC is never to use it for anything private or personal--- enter no logins, no passwords, no personal info, etc. But if you *have* to use one for personal stuff, then booting to a temporary, per-session OS is better; and booting to something like Puppy Linux on a flash drive is better still.
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