Secure portable Win 10 VM

By SouthSider
in Microsoft (Windows)

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Neowinian

SouthSider

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I'm looking to create a secure portable VM (a bit like Windows To Go but as a VM) that I can use at home, work and on the go on. All the machines have VMware Workstation Pro on, my idea is to run the VM off my portable SSD. If I encrypted the SSD with BitLocker (256bit just to be sure), then encrypted the machine with VMware on top of that.... Would that give adequete protection that if lost, I could comfortably leave things like Outlook, Dashlane and browser sessions signed in? Or perhaps somebody could recommend a different way to achieve this?

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Grand Master

+InsaneNutter MVC

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As an alternative you could SSH into your home network, forward a port over the tunnel and Remote Desktop to your main computer at home. Nothing to carry about and potentially loose then.


A portable hard drive / VM encrypted BitLocker should be secure enough though, presuming you trust all the machines you will unlock this drive on.

Neowinian

SouthSider

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4 minutes ago, InsaneNutter said:

As an alternative you could SSH into your home network, forward a port over the tunnel and Remote Desktop to your main computer at home. Nothing to carry about and potentially loose then.


A portable hard drive / VM encrypted BitLocker should be secure enough though, presuming you trust all the machines you will unlock this drive on.

That's not a bad idea actually. I haven't used SSH much beyond basic Linux admin but I will look into this. A small, low powered mini PC might be ideal for this.

Grand Master

+InsaneNutter MVC

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52 minutes ago, SouthSider said:

That's not a bad idea actually. I haven't used SSH much beyond basic Linux admin but I will look into this. A small, low powered mini PC might be ideal for this.

Something like an Intel NUC would be ideal for that, you could even run SSH on that if your router is not capable of doing so. Routers with custom firmware installed such as DD-WRT or Tomato can run an SSH server by clicking a few options in the web ui, running SSH on port 443 should even allow you to connect from behind pretty restrictive firewalls too.

 

From what you've said you likely already know how to establish an SSH session with Putty, so its just a case of setting a tunnel up once you do. Essentially select the destination on your home network you wish to tunnel to and the source port on the local machine you will make the connection from.

 

So for example when I type localhost:1111 in to Remote Desktop, that will go though my SSH tunnel to my machine at home with the ip 192.168.1.3 on my home network:

 

image.thumb.png.320361d93e8dd3bb80bf39cf3486bdd8.png

  • goretsky and Brandon H
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  • 2 weeks later...
Veteran

REM2000

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the only problem with a mobile VM is windows activation, it will detect it's changed environments even if it's VMware to VMware and ask to activate again, i have the same problem in VirtualBox, even on the same machine it will prompt for re-activation. 

 

I think the other options of a NUC, Laptop or remote SSH / RDP session might be easier?

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