Qubes uses Intel VT-d/AMD's AMD-Vi, which is only available on 64-bit architectures, to isolate devices and drivers. Since 2013, Qubes has not had support for 32-bit x86 architectures and now requires a 64-bit processor. However, in practice it typically needs upwards of 6-8 GB of RAM since although it is possible to run it with only 4 GB of RAM, users will likely be limited to running no more than about three Qubes at a time. Qubes 4.x needs at least 32 GiB of disk space and 4 GB of RAM. It is possible (although not trivial) to customize much of the Qubes OS installation but for security reasons, this is discouraged for users that are not intimately familiar with Qubes.
hard drive, USB flash drive) to which it is installed (not just all available free space) and it uses LUKS/ dm-crypt full disk encryption. Ī standard Qubes installation takes all space on the storage medium (e.g. However, it is still possible to use Qubes as part of a multi-boot system and even to use grub2 as the boot loader/boot manager. Qubes was not intended to be run as part of a multi-boot system because if an attacker were to take control of one of the other operating systems then they'd likely be able to compromise Qubes (e.g. UEFI Secure Boot is not supported out of the box, but this is not considered a major security issue. Qubes virtual machines, by default, have passwordless root access (e.g. Each of those domains is run in a separate virtual machine. network domains, USB controller domains), whereas the user's digital life is decided in domains with different levels of trust.įor instance: work domain (most trusted), shopping domain, random domain (less trusted). In Qubes, the isolation is provided in two dimensions: hardware controllers can be isolated into functional domains (e.g.
To secure a desktop a Qubes user takes care to isolate various environments, so that if one of the components gets compromised, the malicious software would get access to only the data inside that environment. One critical bug in any of these interactions may be enough for malicious software to take control over a machine.
The assumption is that there can be no perfect, bug-free desktop environment: such an environment counts millions of lines of code and billions of software/hardware interactions. Qubes implements a Security by Isolation approach. Other proposals of similar systems have surfaced and SecureView is a commercial competitor, however Qubes OS is the only system of the kind actively being developed under a FOSS license. Systems like Qubes are referred to in academia as Converged Multi-Level Secure (MLS) Systems. Virtualization is performed by Xen, and user environments can be based on Fedora, Debian, Whonix, and Microsoft Windows, among other operating systems.
Qubes OS is a security-focused desktop operating system that aims to provide security through isolation. Microkernel ( Xen Hypervisor running minimal Linux-based OSes and others)įedora, Debian, Whonix, Microsoft Windows