LM in hotel while on vacation overseas?

[BarkingGhostar]

So, I had been rolling the many options of how to conduct things like online banking and whatnot while away from home for three weeks in the Q4 of this year. I'll be overseas and gave a thought of installing Linux Mint to a thumb drive using another thumb drive as the installer (e.g. Pen Drive configured Live File System).

I have been impressed with running LM via a rather new USB thumb drive on a USB3 port on a computer. I thought about testing the waters at the hotels where I'll be staying at and using their hardware to boot from USB, into a LM environment.

I then read THIS article this morning and found it more to the point of why one would consider not using the hotel PC+OS. The one thing I've been impressed with was how LM can configure itself for nearly any kind of x86 environment--they only caveat would be the hotel PC being on a static IP.

Thoughts?

 

[Jovec]

If we define the three areas of vulnerability as hardware, software, and network, then booting Linux off a USB stick only protects you from software threats. The computer could, for example, have a hardware keylogger that will record your banking password even though you booted into Linux. There could be a tiny camera positioned above the keyboard in an attempt to identify passwords via keypresses. Or a dozen other things. This is assuming the hotel computers haven't been locked down to prevent booting off of other media, which they should be.

You should consider bringing your own hardware (even just an old phone for it's wifi or a $100 android tablet), as this protects you from most hardware and software vulnerabilities. If you are truly paranoid, you will want to keep your hardware device with you at all times.

On the network side, I'd look into setting up your home router to accept VPN connections (setup and test prior to leaving). You would then connect to that VPN prior to logging in to sensitive sites. Using Tor might make it harder for the non-professionals to grab your info, but security is not what Tor is designed for. You could look into a Tails boot stick if you wanted to go this route. It should be possible to use a VPN through Tor.

I'd also track what sites I logged into and change those passwords upon return or when changing hotels.

Depending on your banking needs and finances, you could probably pre-pay (or schedule appropriate pay dates) for all the bills you need to cover while gone, and take care of the rest upon return. That way you don't even need to log-in from afar.