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rated 0 times [  7] [ 0]  / answers: 1 / hits: 6079  / 3 Years ago, sun, october 17, 2021, 10:15:24

Can Windows viruses affect my encrypted Linux partition on the same disk? I just want to use Windows but I am concerned.


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Yes, absolutely. Any program running on your user account has the ability to do anything that you can do - that includes modifying disks, as long as you have access to them in Explorer. Raw disk access requires administrator permissions, but there are still a lot of evil things that you can do as a standard user account to corrupt a Linux installation, like formatting the partition.


Note that Windows is a fundamentally insecure OS, and if you are concerned about it being able to tamper with your Linux installation, you should be running it in a sufficiently sandboxed virtual machine.


If your computer has a TPM (most recent machines do), it might be possible for you to enable Secure Boot with disk encryption, which would prevent a bare-metal Windows from reading your Linux data (but not corrupting it). It would also prevent it from installing a rootkit in kernel-space (...by bricking your Linux install if it tries), but it wouldn't prevent reflashing/infection of the BIOS like some of the other answers here describe.


Note that UEFI is not separate from the BIOS as some answerers claim. UEFI is simply an interface that some modern BIOSes implement as an alternative (or the only) way of booting the system. Therefore any "UEFI malware" is actually just BIOS malware.


[#500] Tuesday, October 19, 2021, 3 Years  [reply] [flag answer]
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