QubesOS – A reasonably secure operating system • Hacker News Board

Re: QubesOS – A reasonably secure operating system

#61

Post by Syonyk » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 7:47 PM UTC

thoughtbag wrote: post #32

legrande wrote: post #20

What kind of threat model requires someone to use Qubes? I know Snowden uses it and there's even a testimonial of him on the Qubes site recommending it. Is this for people on 'lists' or are high value targets because they visited the wrong site or said something the authorities didn't like and their machines are now being targeted?

I know what Theo says about (x86) virtualization[1], but I think it's still useful to virtually separate your random browsing the web from things like health and banking, or where you keep your ssh keys (if you don't use a Yubikey or similar to keep it off your laptop) -- or other secrets. You can be a victim of a random drive-by, you don't have to be a person on a "list". [1] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=1193…

Yeah. He's probably right. When we first saw Meltdown/Spectre/etc, and he preemtively disabled hyperthreading out of an abundance of paranoia, turned out he was right...

It's all broken, all the way down. However, compromising a browser or kernel is still a lot easier than compromising a hypervisor. At least in terms of number of known exploits.

Qubes tends to make very limited use of the riskier parts of Xen anyway, though. A lot of the security notices for Xen don't apply to Qubes because of how they've configured things or what features they use.

Re: QubesOS – A reasonably secure operating system

#62

Post by kj4ips » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 7:51 PM UTC

Syonyk wrote: post #51

frugalmail wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Double whammy, because sadly you can't run it in a VM either. At least that's my experience.

If your hypervisor supports nested virtualization, it should work. It'll probably grumble about the lack of IOMMU and various other things, but you should be able to run it in VMWare or KVM, if you're willing to jump through some hoops. Not sure why you'd bother, though. If you're already spinning up VMs, just use that capability. Qubes makes "spinning up a ton of VMs on the iron" a lot easier and more usable.

My understanding is that this is how Qubes itself is tested.

Re: QubesOS – A reasonably secure operating system

#63

Post by Syonyk » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 7:52 PM UTC

Forbo wrote: post #6

sigmonsays wrote: post #2

this is my next OS to experiment with. However i'm worried my toy laptop with 16gb of ram (thinkpad t480) wont cut it. Anyone want to chime in here?

Last time I tried to throw it on an old box it couldn't handle it due to the lack of IOMMU. Granted this was like... 5 or so years ago? I think my newer laptop could probably handle it, so maybe it would be worth giving another shot.

There are ways to get it running without an IOMMU, mostly involving making your NetVM and such paravirtualized. You just lose basically all of the hardware isolation benefits there. But for playing around, especially on a trusted LAN, you should be able to get it working. If you can't figure it out, jump on the IRC channel - there are a few people in there pretty good at weird hardware hacking for Qubes.

Re: QubesOS – A reasonably secure operating system

#64

Post by Syonyk » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 7:54 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #28

legrande wrote: post #20

What kind of threat model requires someone to use Qubes? I know Snowden uses it and there's even a testimonial of him on the Qubes site recommending it. Is this for people on 'lists' or are high value targets because they visited the wrong site or said something the authorities didn't like and their machines are now being targeted?

I would say, almost anyone running anything untrusted from time to time can benefit from the strong hardware virtualization. Qubes is my daily driver by the way. My attempt of explaining it to a layman: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-to-pitch-qubes-os/4499/15

And "anything untrusted" includes "any use of the internet."

Browser escapes are cheap enough and common enough that we've seen malware delivered through advertising networks before.

Re: QubesOS – A reasonably secure operating system

#65

Post by eduction » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 7:57 PM UTC

GoofballJones wrote: post #10

I hadn't checked on this project in some time, and last I looked it seemed to be stagnant. Good to see it going strong again. I just remember that, hardware wise, there wasn't a lot of things that could run all aspects of the OS and be 100% with it. The "certified hardware" on the site also looks like it's out of date.

It has remained quite active since I started using Qubes in 2016. I think when Joanna left day to day work it's possible things slowed a bit but I didn't have enough context since that wasn't long after I started.

Based on hanging out in the support forums it seems like there have been some pretty large groups of new users, honestly I have no idea why many came at once but they did. Of course for a project this small, "large" is relative.

The current work includes making dom0 smaller by delegating the gui to a service Qube.

Re: QubesOS – A reasonably secure operating system

#66

Post by flashback2199 » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 7:58 PM UTC

Syonyk wrote: post #58

flashback2199 wrote: post #7

I really like QubesOS, but you cannot run VMs inside a qube, or other things that require VMs like Docker Desktop for Linux, because the xen hypervisor does not support nested virtualization.

You can. It's just neither recommended nor enabled by default. https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/nested-virtualization/14790 Poke around /etc/libvirt/libxl and your particular VM's config file. You'll find some lines like: Enable it, and you should have working nested virtualization.

I did that very thing about a year ago when I still had QubesOS installed, and it did not work. There seems to be a lot of misinformation about this swirling around the web. It simply does not work. There is a post somewhere that confirms it but I don't have the link. Unless the QubesOS devs/maintainers made a 180 degree turn since I tried it and decided to start compiling QubesOS with xen nested virtualization enabled, but I doubt it because their reason was that xen's nested virtualization feature is basically broken anyway.

Re: QubesOS – A reasonably secure operating system

#67

Post by haswell » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 7:59 PM UTC

flashback2199 wrote: post #50

hiatus wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A qube _is_ a VM though, no? So if you wanted to create a VM, you can create a QubesOS template and instantiate that?

Let me know how it works for you

Not a Qubes user, just a curious reader; what is the issue with this? It sounds like you’re implying that what parent said isn’t practical. I’m curious why?

Re: QubesOS – A reasonably secure operating system

#68

Post by flashback2199 » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 7:59 PM UTC

Syonyk wrote: post #59

flashback2199 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure why you'd bother Because some software expects to run a VM itself such as Docker Desktop which I said in my original comment.

And if you'll note, under your original comment I added some detail on how to enable nested virtualization in Qubes.

Replied

Re: QubesOS – A reasonably secure operating system

#69

Post by eduction » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 8:02 PM UTC

beardog wrote: post #13

I love Qubes a lot, I daily drove it for a few years and still have it on a laptop. but i would not recommend it even to most technical people, mainly because you forfeit the ability to run things on bare metal. "dom0" is the same as on normal xen - it is a VM and has the associated overhead still. On top of that, the official Qubes dom0 runs a very outdated fedora version. I am instead writing my own code to automat…

What do you personally want to run on bare metal? I've been using Qubes for 7 years and the only thing I've missed is running MAME since Qubes doesn't do nested virtualization. But I do everything else I need on there - software dev, office productivity, web browsing, email, video transcoding, Spotify etc etc. It's rare I would ever need bare metal. (I'm not a PC gamer though...)

Re: QubesOS – A reasonably secure operating system

#70

Post by thoughtbag » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 8:05 PM UTC

Syonyk wrote: post #61

thoughtbag wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what Theo says about (x86) virtualization[1], but I think it's still useful to virtually separate your random browsing the web from things like health and banking, or where you keep your ssh keys (if you don't use a Yubikey or similar to keep it off your laptop) -- or other secrets. You can be a victim of a random drive-by, you don't have to be a person on a "list". [1] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=1193…

Yeah. He's probably right. When we first saw Meltdown/Spectre/etc, and he preemtively disabled hyperthreading out of an abundance of paranoia, turned out he was right... It's all broken, all the way down. However, compromising a browser or kernel is still a lot easier than compromising a hypervisor. At least in terms of number of known exploits. Qubes tends to make very limited use of the riskier parts of Xen anyway,…

He's been right more times that I can count. Abrasive guy for sure, but he has decided not to suffer idiots. And he does what he does for himself; we are lucky beneficiaries.

Agree wrt your arguments; it's also why I write this in a browser in a VM that is not used for anything else than this sort of thing, and periodically I will roll back to a recent snap shot with a clean browser.

(I do not use Qubes, but I do like their work.)