To review documents received from a hostile and dishonest actor in litigation I used disposable VMs in qubes on a computer with a one way (in only) network connection[1], while running the tools (e.g. evince) in valgrind and with another terminal watching attempted network traffic (an approach that did detect attempted network callbacks from some documents but I don't think any were PDFs).
This would have been useful-- but I think I would have layered it on top of other isolation.
([1] constructed from a media converter pair, a fiber splitter to bring the link up on the tx side, and some off the shelf software for multicast file distribution).
Comments
To review documents received from a hostile and dishonest actor in litigation I used disposable VMs in qubes on a computer with a one way (in only) network connection[1], while running the tools (e.g. evince) in valgrind and with another terminal watching attempted network traffic (an approach that did detect attempted network callbacks from some documents but I don't think any were PDFs).
This would have been useful-- but I think I would have layered it on top of other isolation.
([1] constructed from a media converter pair, a fiber splitter to bring the link up on the tx side, and some off the shelf software for multicast file distribution).