I know OpenbSD has a modified version of chroot that offers decent isolation, but many distros are probably still using versions with chroots that can be broken out of fairly easily. Look into the security of chroot on your distro. Welcome to the 'says a bunch of bullshit' club, if you are using a strong encryption algorithm like AES or Serpent with a 128 or 256 bit key, nobody is going to be cracking it. These symmetric encryption algorithms are even highly resistant to quantum computing attacks that are able to break asymmetric algorithms like RSA (which is often used for session key exchange with GPG). An attacker with a quantum computer with enough stabilized qubits can use Shors algorithm to quickly break this sort of asymmetric encryption, but the best known quantum computer attack against symmetric algorithms is grovers algorithm and it only reduces key size by 1/2 (giving a 256 bit symmetric algorithm the still unbreakable key space of 2^128). Even 128 bit symmetric keys are going to be unbreakable by such quantum computers. And anyway it is likely that nobody currently has any quantum computer with such capability, and if anyone does it is the NSA and they are sure as fuck not going to reveal that they have such abilities by using them against you. GPU does have more processing power for cracking things like encryption than the average CPU does but you still are not going to brute force shit when it comes to strong encryption, even with a large cluster of GPU power. If GPU is so powerful then bitcoin is fucked because it relies on algorithms that could then be brute forced, or even the keyspace of the hashing algorithm it uses would be exhausted. You are right that it is foolish to rely on encryption alone, but your reasons for why it is foolish are even more foolish. You are entirely missing the point of using a virtual machine for isolation. What you are doing is protecting from an attacker who remotely hacks / roots your VM using whatever network facing applications run in it as the vector. If an attacker does this and you use a virtual machine to isolate the exploited applications, the attacker can not trivially get to the host system from their position in the virtual machine. Sure, if you have access to the host OS. Again, you are entirely misunderstanding the benefits of using virtual machines. The RAM can be flash frozen for a significant period of time after power is cut, although the exact time frame depends on the specific sort of RAM. I do not know if all RAM can be flash frozen, but I know a lot of it can. I also know different sorts have different data decay rates. However, considering the fact that you have already demonstrated willingness to talk out of your asshole instead of your mouth, I am inclined to think you have no idea what you are talking about. Please show me a citation. This I know is not correct, cold boot attacks have been demonstrated against several different sorts of RAM. It is a fairly common misconception that RAM is stateless without power being supplied to it, but it has been demonstrated with several sorts of RAM (all tested afaik) that state decay is not instant upon power being cut, taking as long as ten plus minutes in some cases. I believe this sort of attack was first shown by Jacob Appelbaum. You obviously have some understanding of computers, but your understanding is that of a 'computer guy' not a 'security expert'. It is a common misconception that RAM instantly loses its state upon power loss, but security professionals have demonstrated and proven that this is not true several years ago now. Please stop saying as fact things that you have no real idea about. Yes, you are technically correct that the only thing moving in RAM is electrons, however freezing the RAM with liquid nitrogen (or other things, some of which are far easier to work with) will indeed make the state of the electrons persist in RAM for an extended period of time. It also takes a substantial period of time, usually a few minutes, before the state of the RAM decays after power is cut. Why are you wasting your time making shit up and talking about things you don't know about? Let's try to keep the information here high quality and accurate instead of pulled out of our assholes please. Your entire hypothesis is incorrect so you should stop basing your argument off of it. Blah blah blah more wrong information. This attack has been demonstrated, you can see the entire thing carried out on youtube for fucks sake not to mention the attack has been in published papers for a few years now. Any computer security should know about this attack by now, so maybe it is you who should go back to school in computer security instead of unrelated computer science fields. Not all modern operating systems use ASLR (freebsd comes to mind) and many of the operating systems that use any ASLR do so to a limited extent (thus not having full ASLR). Well, you know the key size of encryption is 128 bits of randomness or 256 bits of randomness, so I guess you could just filter out everything that isn't random and then make a dictionary of all 128 and 256 bit strings of randomness that are left. ASLR doesn't randomize the content of ram it randomizes where data is stored in RAM. Stop talking out your asshole. This is true. The only way I have heard of protecting from a cold boot attack when the attacker actually has physical access to the machine is to use encapsulation material to slow their ability to access the RAM, and intrusion detection systems to begin a wipe process in RAM as soon as physical penetration of the case is detected. Even systems that use encapsulation material and similar systems for protecting RAM have been defeated by military hackers, I read about one hacker who worked for the united states government using a combination of I believe liquid helium and an acid wash to remove the encapsulation material from flash frozen RAM, and then he used a highly precise tool with a tip on it about the width of a human hair to obtain the state of the memory. Sorry I can't explain this attack in more technical detail, it is beyond my level of expertise, but I will try to find the article. Given the large amount of bullshit that you have said I think you have no place in lecturing other people on reading up on anything. If you have a masters in computer science I really am impressed with myself that I have managed to become self educated past the point of a masters degree so quickly! It really is hard to determine my skill level considering that fact, but I routinely do find myself pwning the shit out of anyone who has recieved their computer/security training from a school or corporation. He is basing his argument about RAM on a paper / attack discovered by Jacob Appelbaum, a well known security professional and one of the Tor developers. You really have pwnt yourself very hard if you are not trolling.