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Ask Slashdot: Protecting Home Computers From Guests?
An anonymous reader writes "We frequently have guests in our home who ask to use our computer for various reasons such as checking their email or showing us websites. We are happy to oblige, but the problem is many of these guests have high risk computing habits and have more than once infested one of our computers with malware, despite having antivirus and the usual computer security precautions. We have tried using a Linux boot CD but usually get funny looks or confused users. We've thought about buying an iPad for guests to use, but decided it wasn't right to knowingly let others use a computing platform that may have been compromised. What tips do you have to overcome this problem, technologically or otherwise?"
The media PC in my living room boots directly into the Guest account. Under the guest account I can USE almost all the programs I have installed seamlessly. There are some minor issues with software updates, XBOX controllers, and a complete inability to configure network settings, but that's about it. If I need to do anything that requires more rights I can deal with the UAC prompts that show up or simply log out and back in as an admin.
I know it's not flawless but I still feel pretty comfortable letting my tech savvy (e.g. dangerous) friends stay over unattended. It wouldn't hold up to anyone seriously determined to break the security but they have access to the physical machine and can't really be stopped anyway.
I agree. Fullscreen the VM, and they'll probably never even know that they weren't using your "actual" PC.
Windows may be a problem here, but the built-in guest account on OS X is perfect for this purpose. Enable it, and guests can log in the guest account (no password), which acts like a standard user account (they have full access to the browser and any other globally-installed apps) except that at logout, the entire account is wiped clean. Since your guests don't have administrator access to your computer they can't mess up anything outside the guest account, and anything they do inside that account is automatically cleaned up for you when they're done.