Security Parameters for Ubuntu / Bit Curator in Dual Boot Environment

[Carol Kussmann]

Hello,

We are running Bit Curator on a dual boot Windows 7 machine and are increasing our security on our workstation.  

We would like to know if someone could advise us of the following...

1. Private Network

- We have the Workstation computer set up on a private network using a non-routable IP address (192.168.xxx.xxx). We are using the campus proxy server to access to the outside world (e.g., browsers).

- This was done at the network card level so both Windows and Ubuntu use the non-routable IP address.

- Is there any security risk on the Ubuntu side, or back door, especially as everyone logs in as an admin?  

- If there are any security risks or holes on the Ubuntu side, what precautions do we need to set up to close them?

2.  Encryption

- We want to encrypt the drives on the machine.  We have the C Drive and an internal hard drive D.  

- C is split to dual boot.  We set it up that D can be seen by both Windows and Ubuntu.

- The D Drive is Windows formatted, which we want to encrypt.  If we want to continue to let both Windows and Ubuntu view the D drive, which system needs to encrypt the drive? Can Windows read (decrypt) a Ubuntu partition? Or, can Ubuntu read (decrypt) a Windows partition?

3. Dual Boot vs Virtual Machine

- We haven't used BC as much as we thought we would.  I would assume - to a point - that these might be better/easier to do if we went to using BC in a virtual machine.  

- What main concerns/limitations would there be to moving to the virtual machine environment? 

Thank you in advance for any assistance.

Best,

Carol 

--

Carol Kussmann

Digital Preservation Analyst

Digital Preservation and Repository Technologies | University of Minnesota Libraries

499 Wilson Library, 309 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455

Tel: 612.626.0099

Email: kuss...@umn.edu

[Matthew Disregardmatthew Farrell]

I can't speak to 1, or 2, unfortunately. Hopefully someone else can.

As to 3, we are also currently dual booting Windows 7/BC. We are also building a new workstation and will be running BC as a VM on that machine. There are three main concerns I have with running as a VM, though we're hoping to mitigate these.

A. When we started using BitCurator, our machine had very little RAM (4GB at the time), so running BC as a VM in VirtualBox was difficult. Processes like bulk_extractor and fiwalk took very long periods of time for any storage volume larger than an optical disc. While we can't avoid this issue entirely, we've upped the memory in our current workstation we're planning to virtualize on the new machine with Hyper-V, which our IT department believes handles memory management more effectively than VirtualBox.

B. Making the host machine's ports and drives available in the VM can be problematic. I have been inconsistently successful getting VirtualBox to recognize certain host ports, so relied on disk imaging tools outside of BC.

C. Shared folders between the host and VM can also be annoying if not planned for and managed properly. Early on in our BC testing, I did not have a good policy in place for moving data from the shared folder to long term storage, which resulted in data loss when VirtualBox hiccuped. 

Hope this helps.

best,

farrell

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