Comment by fsflover
2 days ago
It looks like you you may be interested in Qubes OS, security oriented operating system relying on strong, hardware-assisted virtualization: https://qubes-os.org. My daily driver, can't recommend it enough.
2 days ago
It looks like you you may be interested in Qubes OS, security oriented operating system relying on strong, hardware-assisted virtualization: https://qubes-os.org. My daily driver, can't recommend it enough.
I know about it, but I'm not interested in QubeOS approach. It's VMs all the way down, while what I'm talking about is no VMs and capabilities as first class citizens and no vurtualization.
I am also surprised that capabilities weren't more widely implemented after mobile OSes demonstrated they are practical. I know Windows made a move in that direction with UAC but had to soften it due to user alert fatigue. So I guess having no legacy apps and a centralized repository helps.
I've recently been looking into Guix SD as a solution. Its package management is designed to keep programs independent of each other, so containers are cheap and lightweight. Trying out untrusted software is as easy as `guix shell --container --pure --no-cwd [program]`, which blocks access to the network, file system, and environment variables. Right now I'm adding more advanced capability management: limits on CPU, memory, storage space, network use, etc.
I use nix + bwrap, which gives a similar result. it works well enough, though I really ought to restrict reads to only the closure.
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What is wrong about virtualization? It allows to run all existing software, it doesn't restrict the owner of the device, it is extremely flexible and reliable. And it can be fast, too.
see other comment, the author describes some issues with current hardware virtualization. kvm is also pretty good, but not perfect... and completely irrelevant with GPU pass-through enabled. =3
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Qubes OS was also shown to have inherent hardware virtualization sandbox vulnerabilities described by Joanna Rutkowska in an interesting lecture.
There is likely a PoC around someplace if people dig a bit. =3
Are talking about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(software)
It happened in 2006 and never happened after that. I would consider it as secure as it gets.
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