vm machine holding wallet?

[mike678]

I won't lie I'm not sure if this is any more secure but what if you stored a completely separate wallet on a virtual machine and transfered from your normal wallet to the virtual machine wallet.
If an exe that is meant to steal wallet's infects your computer could it just search and find the wallet in the vm or would it specifically need to know your running a vm to be able to find it?

I'm just curious because that would make things simpler I think because you don't have to worry about an encrypted drive breaking and losing all the data forever.

So feel free to rip away and tell me why this wont work.

[XRcode]

It would make it more unlikely that a trojan would get your wallet, but it is still possible.

[mike678]

How much harder would it be for a trojan to find it?

[error]

No trojans in the wild currently look for Bitcoin wallets in virtual machines; however you can be sure that if it becomes common, someone will write a new trojan.

[lowlevel]

This also doesn't really help you if you happen to execute a trojan within your virtual machine.

[mike678]

This also doesn't really help you if you happen to execute a trojan within your virtual machine.

Well the only point of the vm would be to hold the wallet not to do anything else. Why would you search the web or add programs in it?

[XRcode]

You would probably just be better off to store your wallet on a usb drive that you remove from your computer when not in use.

[JoelKatz]

If the vm were only running when needed, was only used to hold the wallet, and all vm sharing features were turned off *in* *the* *vm*, you should be relatively safe. The truly paranoid would encrypt the vm's virtual hard drive partition containing the wallet from within the vm, that way the trojan can't extract it from the host's file holding the vm's hard drive data.

[grod]

Don't run Windows on any machine you have your master wallet on, create a separate account JUST to use that wallet, only log into that account to send funds and never to web surf or run executables and you should be safe enough. 

In fact, boot a live CD of some oddball, pre-bitcoin, tiny market share OS like Dragonfly BSD from '09, use a USB drive for your encrypted home directory, wallet & bitcoin installation and you should be safe from common wallet-stealing malware.