Another late night thanks to these wonderful machines.

A quick question while I wait for my backup to transfer to the desktop's new Mint 9 installation (so far, so nice).

I'm finding the Mint persistent install to a flash drive far more useful than I'd expected, but am a little concerned about security. It'd be interesting to know what others think.

Presumably, as an essentially live distro, it runs with root privileges. Does anyone know a straightforward way to overcome this?

Presumably the system files are read-only (I honestly don't know this) - yet the fact that changes can be persisted between boots, even on different computers, makes me wonder whether the whole thing might be a little more vulnerable than Linux normally is.

Not exactly urgent, but interesting. Google hasn't helped me much so far.

Any ideas how to protect a persistent flash drive install?