Ask Slashdot: How Do You Best Protect Client Files From Wireless Hacking?

dryriver writes: A client has given you confidential digital files containing a design for a not-yet-public consumer product. You need to work on those files on a Windows 10 PC that has a wireless chipset built into it. What can you do, assuming that you have to work under Windows 10, that would make 3rd party wireless access to this PC difficult or impossible? I can imagine that under a more transparent, open-source, power-user OS like Linux, it would be a piece of cake to kill all wireless access completely and reliably even if the system contains wireless hardware. But what about a I-like-to-phone-home-sometimes, non open-source OS like Windows 10 that is nowhere near as open and transparent? Is there a good strategy for making outside wireless access to a Windows 10 machine difficult or impossible?

Comments

Re:Virtualization

[scdeimos]

I was going to suggest VirtualBox as well.

I routinely install Windows into VirtualBox guests that have no virtual LAN adapters configured (i.e.: no network access). The guests can only access: inserted optical discs and/or .iso files; authorized USB sticks; persistent/non-persistent VirtualBox shares.

The big downside, though, is accelerated graphics:

• You pay a significant penalty for DirectX under VirtualBox.
• The video drivers installed with VirtualBox Guest Additions have OpenGL support limited to API Level 2.1, so you can't run anything that requires OpenGL 3 or better.
• The VBGA OpenGL driver implementation is also really quite flakey. e.g.: Blender won't work with it, but can be made to work if you download the OpenGL Software Driver from the Blender FTP site. Of course this horribly slow because, you know, no hardware acceleration.
• Also the VBGA OpenGL drivers are disabled by default for Windows 8 or later guests. You can enable them by running the Guest Additions installer from the command line with switches and/or Registry hacks.