My work involves handling a LOT of files, and I will need to open them regularly. These involve images, PDFs, videos, Word documents, etc.
Opening them one by one (especially when I need to find a specific one) on disposable VMs take a lot of time.
For images/videos, enabling thumbnails on Thunar helps a lot, though thumbnail generation might be an attack vector in itself (?).
I was thinking, does it even matter to open each single file in disposables if my vault is offline?
There is a chance a malware persists itself in the vault, and periodically attempts a ping home before it tries to do its thing. Would this be the only concern?
If this is the case, there is nothing I can do about it other than ensuring the vault NEVER goes online, correct?
Disposables would be a better idea. If you don’t like the amount of time it takes, just copy all the files for a reading session into one disposable and shut it down when you’re done with all of them.
Personally I store downloaded media in an offline appVM and set xdg-mime so that opening media does so in an offline named dispVM, automatically. There are guides in the forum, but the key is to have a <media-type>.desktop file in .local/share/applications/ with the line
Exec=qvm-open-in-vm <named-disposable>
and to use the xdg-mime command to set the defaults, for example
Yes, an untrusted file may exploit an unknown vulnerability in the parser to attack your persistent VM, which instantly and forever would compromise it.
First, if your VM is compromised, then it can infect all files inside, and whenever you share these files with anyone, you endanger the recipient. Second, a compromised VM could perform a side channel attack, like this, and even try to perform a coordinated attack on other VMs with other compromised VMs.