Windows emulator under Icognito LiveCD
 

Hello

In some few cases I would appreciate to have the possibility to use Windows apps under an "emulator" like VMware under Icognito...

In addition this setup could help prevent apps from leaking my real IP...


Some years ago, there was a Linux LiveCD with VMware 4.x(?). As much I can remember the name of that distro was CoolLinux...


Question:
What makes it today nearly impossible to integrate a Windows emulator under a Linux LiveCD?


Thank's a lot for any feedback!

John

The performance impact of running the operating system through a live CD coupled with the storage requirements of a secondary OS image make it difficult to run a VM on a live CD. You would do better to rune WINE, which I understand at least some of the live CDs offer as an option.

Performance would still be pretty poor, but at least the live CD doesn't have to carry around a Windows image.

Wine would be a good choice and useful too.

Might I ask why? Running Windows like that pretty much would remove all security advantages of running Incognito.

What could be possible security breaches? Let's say I run incognito through vmware or qemu. What could the win app do? It cannot get info about its neighbouring (hmm, that's not true, right - LAN is enabled for direct access) and my real computer (isolated virtual machine) and all network traffic goes through tor anyway.

What do you mean exactly? In jaara's example you run Windows inside Incognito using a virtual machine, e.g. vmware -- not the other way around. In order to avoid confusion, please explain exactly which kind of setup you're talking about.

Ok, let's take a close look.
I have my Win OS and I need to be anonymous for some time, I run Incognito in virtual machine. Then apart from regular browsing, I need to run a windows app anonymously. It cannot be done (simply) in my regular Windows (host) environment, but inside Incognito (guest system), I would have nothing to fear of. All traffic goes throught tor and inside guest OS the app cannot do any harm (and cannot get any info about true me). But I need wine for running the app.

That's not necessarily true -- it depends on the application you use. Sure, in your scenario it's very unlikely that your wine:ed windows app would leak you IP address (since Incognito wouldn't have access to it), but depending on the application, it can leak other dangerous information (system time, files, user name/passwords, etc) which could be used to pinpoint your true identity.

What's worse, the app could contain backdoors or bugs (which is more difficult to tell if the application is closed source, which is usually the case with windows apps) which potentially could compromise your entire Incognito session. It should be mentioned that the latter (Incognito compromise) is very unlikely, but, on the other hand, the former (leaks) is very likely. To prevent leaks each app has to be auditted, and I've done some of that for most of the apps included.

In any case, what you're talking about is very different from what john99 wants -- he wants a "windows emulator", i.e. a virtual machine, running a complete virtualk Windows session under Incognito. Wine is neither an emulator nor a virtual machine, and in general I believe it would be a much safer approach. I barely dare to think about how much information and how many backdoors a complete Windows system contains...