If I created a partition on the hard disk on my macbook and put the offline armoury wallet on that so that the online line + offline armoury were running on the same computer, would that work? Would that be as secure as a separate device?
Thanks for the answers so far.
(I did try searching for answers to this question but couldn't find them).
No, but it would still be
significantly more secure than an online wallet. An eventual virus or trojan would need to move itself to the "offline" partition to get your password or private keys next time you boot into that partition. That is of course trivial to do, but it
does require that the malware is specifically written to do just that. The mass-distributed bitcoin stealing software is less likely to pull this off. The same goes for having the "offline" wallet on a virtual machine with an encrypted disk - safer and less convenient than an ordinary online wallet, less safe but more convenient than a truly offline wallet.
EDIT: The more I think about the "two partition scheme", the less I like it. It is probably a fairly standard feature of most malware writing kits to include code that infects any other partitions/disks present on the infected machine. So the bitcoin stealing malware will quickly make it to the not-so-offline partition. And since it runs on the same hardware as the online machine, the malware also has access to the network card (although it is hopefully unconfigured) and might offload the data it has stolen.
