Skip to main content

Qubes OS: First Impressions

A few days ago, while browsing security topics online, Qubes OS surfaced—whether via YouTube recommendations or search results, I can't recall precisely. Intrigued by its unique approach to security through compartmentalization, I delved into the documentation and watched some demos. My interest was piqued enough that I felt compelled to install it and give it a try firsthand.

My overall first impression of Qubes OS is highly positive. Had I discovered it earlier, I might have reconsidered starting my hardware password manager project.

Conceptually, Qubes OS is not much different from running a bunch of virtual machines simultaneously. However, its brilliance lies in the seamless desktop integration and the well-designed template system, making it far more user-friendly than a manual VM setup. I was particularly impressed by the concept of disposable VMs for temporary tasks and the clear separation of critical functions like networking (sys-net) and USB handling (sys-usb) into their own isolated VMs.

Although the default Qubes OS environment is Fedora-based, it doesn't feel drastically different from my experiences with Arch or Debian. This reinforces my feeling that the core differences between many Linux distributions are shrinking. It's also a plus that Qubes officially supports templates for Debian and other systems, offering valuable flexibility. (While exploring Qubes, I noted other compartmentalization-focused OS projects exist, like Spectrum OS and RancherOS, though I haven't investigated them yet.)

After using the system for just a few days, I can already see how its compartmentalized approach could be incredibly beneficial for managing different aspects of digital life securely. However, despite my enthusiasm, I'm hesitant to adopt Qubes OS as my daily driver just yet. I encountered a few practical hurdles:

  1. Secure Boot Support: Qubes OS doesn't currently support Secure Boot. This is inconvenient for my dual-boot setup with Windows, as it requires toggling the setting in the BIOS every time I switch operating systems. According to a recent talk, support might arrive with version 4.3, which is encouraging.
  2. Anti Evil Maid (AEM): While AEM is an excellent security concept, its current implementation has significant restrictions that make it difficult to use easily on many systems. My current workaround is just keeping the boot partition on a separate USB drive.
  3. Backup Workflow: The built-in backup tool enforces encryption. While I understand the security rationale, this complicates my preferred strategy of frequent (e.g., hourly) incremental backups to a trusted location. Although tutorials exist for bypassing this, native support for optionally disabling encryption (perhaps with strong warnings) would be a welcome convenience.
  4. Bluetooth: This seems to be a minor point, but Bluetooth isn't supported out-of-the-box and requires additional setup to get working with peripherals.
  5. GPU Passthrough: Setting up GPU passthrough for performance-intensive applications (like gaming) appears non-trivial. This limitation means I'll likely need to keep my Windows installation as a dual boot for gaming purposes.

In conclusion, Qubes OS is a fascinating and powerful operating system with a unique and compelling security architecture. I'm genuinely impressed with its design and potential. However, the current practical limitations prevent me from making it my primary OS at this time. I'll definitely be keeping a close eye on its development, and may revisit it as these areas mature.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Determine Perspective Lines With Off-page Vanishing Point

In perspective drawing, a vanishing point represents a group of parallel lines, in other words, a direction. For any point on the paper, if we want a line towards the same direction (in the 3d space), we simply draw a line through it and the vanishing point. But sometimes the vanishing point is too far away, such that it is outside the paper/canvas. In this example, we have a point P and two perspective lines L1 and L2. The vanishing point VP is naturally the intersection of L1 and L2. The task is to draw a line through P and VP, without having VP on the paper. I am aware of a few traditional solutions: 1. Use extra pieces of paper such that we can extend L1 and L2 until we see VP. 2. Draw everything in a smaller scale, such that we can see both P and VP on the paper. Draw the line and scale everything back. 3. Draw a perspective grid using the Brewer Method. #1 and #2 might be quite practical. #3 may not guarantee a solution, unless we can measure distances/p...
3 comments
Read More »

Chasing an IO Phantom

My home server has been weird since months ago, it just becomes unresponsive occassionally. It is annoying but it happens only rarely, so normally I'd just wait or reboot it. But weeks ago I decided to get to the bottom of it. What's Wrong My system set up is: Root: SSD, LUKS + LVM + Ext4 Data: HDD, LUKS + ZFS 16GB RAM + 1GB swap Rootless dockerd The system may become unresponsive, when the IO on HDD  is persistantly high for a while. Also: Often kswapd0 has high CPU High IO on root fs (SSD) From dockerd and some containers RAM usage is high, swap usage is low It is very strange that IO on HDD can affect SSD. Note that when this happens, even stopping the IO on HDD does not always help. Usually restarting dockerd does not help, but rebooting helps. Investigation: Swap An obvious potential root cause is the swap. High CPU on kswapd0 usually means the free memory is low and the kernel is busy exchanging data between disk and swap. However, I tried the following steps, none of the...
Post a Comment
Read More »

Fix Google Security Code

Google Security Code (http://g.co/sc) is one type of 2-step verification. This is particularly useful when security keys and passkeys are not available. I have been using it in my LXC containers, until today I found out that it stopped working. It just kept saying "The code is invalid". It is easy to rule out some factors: The code works on other browsers on my laptop. The code works on other devices that are directly connected to the router. So it appears that Google also checks IP addresses besides the security code. Recently I have IPv6 enabled, so most devices that are directly connected to the router have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. But  I only enabled IPv4 for my LXC containers. So I guess when a code is generated by device A and used by device B, Google should be able to check that device A and device B are closely located. But in my case, IPv6 address appears on device A but not on device B, which may look suspicious. To fix the problem, I just needed to disable IPv...
Post a Comment
Read More »