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Perhaps this would be the sort of situation where you boot from read-only USB stick, or LiveCD.

Fine, but how would you verify your read-only USB stick or LiveCD before use?

Theoretically someone could sneak and replace the LiveCD with one that looks identical but is infected with the required malware[1].

Carrying it on you, or locking it in the safe in the room[2], might mitigate that I suppose.

1. Sneak in once, steal a copy of the USB/LiveCD contents, go away and create a new version infected with malware, sneak in again and swap them over.

2. Not really safe as one previous link on HN showed.

This seems like something where Secure Boot, with user-provided keys, would really be handy. Create a key pair and tell your computer to only boot from stuff signed with your own key, then it will refuse to boot from a tampered USB stick or CD.

AFAIK, that can be somewhat problematic for windows. Why windows you ask? Most poker clients are windows only. It's probably possible to boot windows from a LiveCD, but when I looked at it in the past, it wasn't straightforward.

Stars and Tilt are both native to Windows and OS X and both can run on Linux with Wine.

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