Dual boot security question.

[chris667]

Hello

As you'll no doubt work out, I'm not an IT professional. My job is working for the family business, but being small I do all our computing stuff.

We have some specialised software which only works under Windows, and handle confidential data, so it's always been heavily encrypted on a seperate computer with no physical connection to the Internet. Backups are made onto Truecrypt containers onto several USB flash drives which are stored offsite and periodically copied to cloud storage. Traditionally, we've had a procession of old PCs to do this, but our most recent one is starting to look a bit wobbly.

It's all backed up, of course, I can replace it all easily enough, but I was thinking. What if I put a copy of Windows on a partition on our web/email laptop(running Mint, 'natch), encrypted the partition with Truecrypt(unless you could suggest something better), and have it dual-boot at startup? There's nothing that can be done to the Windows partition (except deletion), is there? Or have I missed something?

Before you ask, Wine is not an option with our software. I know my proposed solution is rather inelegant and I'd love to ditch Windows, but there is no other way.

[xenopeek]

If the data on the Windows partition is Truecrypt encrypted, then without you providing the decryption keys there is nothing Linux Mint can do to it except, as you say, delete it If you already store the Truecrypt encrypted data in the cloud for backup, I figure there is not much of additional risk here.

[chris667]

I was reasonably sure what I was doing was adequate. But I've spent a lot of time thinking about encrypting this disk, and have been through a lot of material to get the background. There's so much information written by people who think they know a lot about computer security!

It's reassuring to get a second opinion from someone who agrees. I hate joining a forum and asking a question without giving something back; I'll make a donation and hopefully answer a newbie question next time.

Thank you.

[danmiddle2]

These instructions might be of use to you:

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=91676

Obviously you can also encrypt data in a further truecrypt partition (as opposed to in the OS partition), but this should give you extra piece of mind as even the pagefile and swap partitions are encryption with this route.

All the best,

Dan