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

Bios settings

[smylie]

Most (all excluding Apple?) laptops wil allow you to turn off / disable the wireless chipset in the bios. Many also have a physical kill switch on the side of the case.

Barring some wikileaks sort of tomfoolery from the CIA, this should stop any network access (assuming you also don't plug in a network cable).

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.

Re:Two options immediately suggest themselves:

[peragrin]

Exactly. My Samsung smart TV would randomly turn on the wireless and try to communicate outside. When I first set it up I used wifi, realized how stupid it was and switched it to the wired connection, which then was left unplugged.

I upgraded my router and was screwing around when I noticed a new device was connecting( I used the same SSID and WPA key in both). After shutting everything down I turned on the TV and checked, wifi off,. I turned on wifi and bam. Same Mac address as my mystery guest. That was promptly banned. No wifi for you sneaky TV.

So even if you give a device access the only way to be sure is to disconnect it thoroughly.and software can be sneaky.