LiveCD for Secure Web Browsing?

An anonymous reader asks: "Say you want to do your online Internet banking on your home PC, with a bank that lets you send actual money to complete strangers online, and you want to be really, really sure that some hacker isn't stealing your password or your money or both. You don't fully trust Windows, despite your best efforts to keep it secure, and you know that no OS installed on a hard disk is guaranteed secure or immune to root-kits and the like. You know enough about computer security to know that you are always just one careless mouse click or one security hole away from being screwed. You've read the advice from your bank, which says 'turn up' your security settings (whatever that means), and don't click on 'unknown' links (ever). So what you really need is a bootable CD with software so simple and stripped down that it lets you browse the web and nothing else. The nearest I can think of is one of the Linux mini-LiveCD's with Mozilla or some other browser included, such as Damn Small Linux, or ByzantineOS. Such a system shouldn't even know how to speak to your hard drives. Do Slashdot readers know of anything like this?"

Comments

Enough...

[NemosomeN]

Just using Knoppix/DSL should be enough, you don't have to worry about the CD being able to access the harddrive. Just use a base Mozilla with no extensions or whatever, and type in your bank's URL manually and don't do anything else. That should make you 99.99999% safe, excepting the .00001% chance God and Jesus hate you and are conspiring to ruin your life. Good luck.

Hardware insecurity

[cbr2702]

Knoppix with Mozilla ought to be fine for the software end of things, but the hardware could be compromised too. Someone could have a hardware keylogger such as the KeyKatcher . Building your own computer from scratch is the only way to really be sure. And by "from scratch" I mean from the raw ore.