Instructor: In this demonstration, I want to show you
how you can better secure your virtual machine
from your outside environment.
We're going to do that by using encryption
as well as disabling sharing
between the host operating system,
in my case, the Mac system,
and my Windows 10 virtual machine.
If I don't allow sharing between the two,
that way, even if the Windows machine gets a virus
or some sort of malware,
it can't escape the virtual environment,
and it can't affect my host operating system,
which is the Mac.
So from within VirtualBox on the left side,
you'll have all of your systems listed.
On this one, it's a new install,
and I only have the one Windows 10 machine
that I made earlier.
Now, if you go ahead and click on it
and then click on settings,
you'll have these settings for it.
There's two areas that I want to go through.
The first one is disk encryption.
You have this file on your system
that's holding your entire Windows operating system,
that virtual machine.
So I'm going to go into Finder,
and it's in my VirtualBox VM folder.
In here, I have this one folder that is Windows 10.
And underneath it, you'll see that I have some log files.
I have some configuration files,
which is my VirtualBox settings, and this VDI.
This 9 gigabyte file is the entire hard drive image
of that Windows 10 machine.
And right now it's not encrypted,
and so anybody who got this access
to this machine could get the data
from that Windows machine.
And we don't want that.
So one of the things you want to do is go into VirtualBox
and under your general tab,
there is this disk encryption setting.
You can enable disk encryption.
You can choose which cipher it's going to use,
AES 256 or AES 128, 256 has a higher bit key,
so it's going to be better.
And then you can give it a long strong password.
Something like this is going to give me
a nice, long, 16 character password,
which is a mixture of uppercase, lowercase,
special characters and numbers.
When I click OK, it's going to go through
and encrypt that disk image.
This may take a while on your system
depending on how powerful your system is
because the encryption process does have
to take processing resources and disk access resources.
On my system, this only took about 30 seconds
because we have a very high performant system
using solid state hard drives.
The second thing we want to do is go into our settings
and look at our shared folders.
So right now you can see under disk encryption,
we do have a nice encrypted disk.
And when we go over here to our shared folders,
we don't have any setup right now.
Now here inside the shared folders,
if you add a folder, this will make a connection
between the virtual machine and the host machine.
So in my case, if I want to go ahead and connect
my Mac's desktop folder to this Windows machine
I can go ahead and hit auto mount,
which will allow me to auto mount this folder
as a shared resource that the Windows machine can get.
You can also do it as read-only,
so it's a one-way transfer
where the Windows machine can read from the Mac,
but the Mac can't read from the Windows machine right now.
I have it set up as a two-way share.
We'll go ahead and hit OK.
And I can go ahead and boot up this Windows machine.
Once you go to boot it, because we've set that encryption,
we do have to enter that long strong password each time.
That is decrypting the file
and allowing us to boot up the hard drive.
And now once we're booted up into Windows,
we can click on the folder, we can go to network,
and you'll see there is now this network server
called V box server.
This is what hosts all the shared files and folders.
And so here we can see the desktop folder
that I shared is now sitting there.
And from here,
you can see my Mac desktop is currently empty.
Now if I look at the Mac,
you can see there's nothing on my desktop.
Let's go ahead and make a file here
just to show that we have a connection between the two.
I'm going to go ahead
and create a text document said from Windows.
And now if I go back over here,
you'll see from Windows is there.
And that two-way connection is dangerous
because if you have a Windows host system
and a Windows virtual machine system,
and you get some sort of a virus or malware
inside the virtual machine,
it can then be transferred to your host computer.
So what I recommend is that
we don't have that connection set up.
So inside of VirtualBox,
I like to go in and delete those connections,
and make sure that this virtual machine stays isolated,
that there is not a connection between the two.
And that is going to give you a little bit more security
when using these virtual machines.