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The Operating System That Can Protect You Even if You Get Hacked

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Re: The Operating System That Can Protect You Even if You Get Hacked

#11

Post by euank »

sept wrote: post #9
euank wrote: post #2

Of course, the entire premise of this operating system is that VMs are secure, even though there have been exploits targeting them in the past [0]. Disabling virtualization capabilities in the bios is a semi-common recommendation for securing a computer... Still, this OS is a darn sight better than nothing and it'll certainly protect against most things. However, touting it as perfect is misleading. [0]: https://en.w…

You do know that the Blue Pill exploit was created by the developers of Qubes, right?

No, I had no clue that was the case! That's pretty reassuring to know. It still doesn't change that my confidence in the Hyperviser has been shaken a little, but I trust this more knowing that, and I do think the premise of Qubes is great and relatively secure - if not certainly perfect.

Re: The Operating System That Can Protect You Even if You Get Hacked

#12

Post by rdl »

I love Qubes; the people involved are awesome.

What I'd really like to work on is Compartment Mode Workstation with physically distinct hardware.

Essentially, a "windowing KVM" frontend to a bunch of physically separated processor/memory subsystems, connected via well-defined networking interfaces. Essentially X Windows, but actually secure. This is sort of how desktop virtualization (VDI) works today, but with a separate instance per application.

Re: The Operating System That Can Protect You Even if You Get Hacked

#13

Post by comex »

> If a Pidgin-zero-day-wielding attacker sends you a weird-looking message that takes over your computer, all it will actually take over is your Pidgin AppVM. The worst that the attacker can do is steal your OTR keys and spy on your chat conversations

Yes, the only thing the attacker can do is compromise all of your chat conversations and impersonate you on an ongoing basis. Maybe you keep a separate browser VM for sensitive work: good, but only secure as long as you never ever accidentally visit a site you don't completely trust, such as any HTTP site.

Don't get me wrong, I think Qubes is really cool, but our ultimate goal, collectively, should be an OS where the entire stack, except possibly a few lowest level components (but not including things like filesystems and network drivers), is written in a higher level language than C/C++ and guaranteed free of memory corruption vulnerabilities in the first place. While non-memory corruption vulnerabilities exist, they're generally drastically easier to reason about and prevent, while C vulnerabilities can be anywhere, with exploit mitigations that make most attacks only harder, not impossible.

In the meantime, I guess you could always browse using Chromium with ASan enabled :)

Re: The Operating System That Can Protect You Even if You Get Hacked

#15

Post by uuid_to_string »

Love the comment by "z". :)

The people working on this are sharp, for sure.

But I will never think of VM's as a path to "security".

Xen is useful for a variety of purposes (including resiliency, which can help if you are hacked), but I'll never rely on it for "security".

Curious what bootloader they are using for the Xen kernels.

Re: The Operating System That Can Protect You Even if You Get Hacked

#17

Post by drill_sarge »

As an attacker I care only about the data and don't give a a shit if it is a real machine or a virtual one. If I can sniff the passwords in your browser or just have a keylogger in one of the VMs I am fine. Not sure if that solves a thing.

edit: I remember there were similar concepts a decade or so ago. where you had your "green" desktop for intranet or whatever and then a seperate "red" desktop which you could switch to and go to the evil internet. hint: no benefit gained

Re: The Operating System That Can Protect You Even if You Get Hacked

#18

Post by MichaelGG »

I've recently switched to using VMWare for everything, and disabling networking on the host (use a pfSense VM for networking). It's quite handy, but still feels a bit heavyweight. Of course, I'm sort of forced to run Windows as the host to ensure best driver/battery support.

I really hope these approaches like Qubes take off and that things get optimized for this type of workload. I'm not sure why Microsoft has ignored lightweight virtualization, both on client and server.

Re: The Operating System That Can Protect You Even if You Get Hacked

#20

Post by Guvante »

comex wrote: post #13

> If a Pidgin-zero-day-wielding attacker sends you a weird-looking message that takes over your computer, all it will actually take over is your Pidgin AppVM. The worst that the attacker can do is steal your OTR keys and spy on your chat conversations Yes, the only thing the attacker can do is compromise all of your chat conversations and impersonate you on an ongoing basis. Maybe you keep a separate browser VM for s…

Every time I hear about moving the entire stack to high level languages I have two thoughts:

* I love high level languages, but is there even a toy OS that provides a decent amount of functionality with tolerable performance without cheating? * There is no silver bullet to anything, let alone security. Automatic bounds checks only solve that one problem.

For instance, most would consider this an order of some of the vulnerabilities that potentially exist in increasing severity. And note that the first one is what Heartbleed is qualified as.

* Buffer overrun on read * Buffer overrun on write * Arbitrary code execution

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