I want to visit a web site, but I want to ensure there is no trace left on my computer that I did so. How do I do that?
This question is not concerned with anonymity or detection on the network side, but on the local side. I am familiar with the major browsers safe browsing modes, private browsing, etc. However, that can still leave artifacts in some cases, e.g. from plugins. Also, this question is not concerned with malware, rootkits, keyloggers, etc. I won't be uploading or downloading files. I'm not concerned about preventing eavesdropping of files. Assume that I am already using Tor, a VPN, or a similar mechanism to prevent eavesdroppers, ISPs, and web servers from identifying me.
Instead, my question is how to eliminate local evidence on my machine that I went to a particular website. For example, maybe I want to check political websites but have no record stored on my local machine, even if I am using plugins, etc.
I do not want to boot a Live CD. While I realize a Live CD could be used for this purpose, the idea is you are doing your normal Windows stuff then you want to do banking, political activities, or "leisure" browsing for a few minutes.
I was wondering if there is any real value to a setup like this:
- Create a ramdisk
- Install sandbox software
- Get a "portable" version of the browser
- Run the sandboxed version of the portable browser on the ramdisk.
My thought being, you can just kill the ram disk to delete all traces. Would you even need to use a private mode at this point? If the sandbox is prevented from writing outside of the ramdisk I would imagine you'd be safe.
The other issue would be how much of a pain would it be to set this up. Ideally, the sandbox is destroyed when the portable browser is closed; when you open the app it creates the sandbox and copies the portable version to the ramdisk-sandbox from the original version.
Does this work? Is this an effective way to solve the problem? Any thoughts on how to actually set this up?
Revision history: At first there was some confusion; some folks interpreted the original version of this question to be asking about how to protect yourself from malware. That's not what I'm looking for. Instead, I'm looking to prevent leaving evidence on my hard disk of what web site I visited, for a particular web site, and with as little inconvenience as possible.