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Renk
18.04.10, 00:29
Joanna Rutkowska, a security researcher known for her work on virtualization security and low-level rootkits, has released a new open-source operating system meant to provide isolation of the OS's components for better security.

The OS, called Qubes, is based on Xen, X and Linux and is in a basic, alpha stage right now. Qubes relies on virtualization to separate applications running on the OS and also places many of the system-level components in sandboxes to prevent them from affecting each other.

Qubes implements Security by Isolation approach. To do this, Qubes utilizes virtualization technology, to be able to isolate various programs from each other, and even sandbox many system-level components, like networking or storage subsystem, so that their compromise don’t affect the integrity of the rest of the system.

Qubes lets the user define many security domains implemented as lightweight Virtual Machines (VMs), or “AppVMs”. E.g. user can have “personal”, “work”, “shopping”, “bank”, and “random” AppVMs and can use the applications from within those VMs just like if they were executing on the local machine, but at the same time they are well isolated from each other. Qubes supports secure copy-and-paste and file sharing between the AppVMs, of course.

Qubes is on public release since april 7.

Although Qubes is in alpha stage, one of my friends who tried it said to me it is usable.

He is the installation wiki:
InstallationGuide ? Qubes (http://www.qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/InstallationGuide)


And the project website:
Home (http://qubes-os.org/Home.html)

SBfreak
18.04.10, 00:52
Seems to me like just another linux distro running KDE:confused2:

Renk
18.04.10, 02:30
Seems to me like just another linux distro running KDE:confused2:


This issue is addressed in their FAQ:



* Isn’t Qubes just another Linux distribution after all?

Well, if you really want to call it a distribution, then we’re more of a “Xen distribution”, rather then a Linux one. But Qubes is much more than just Xen packaging -- it has its own VM management infrastructure, with support for template VMs, centralized VM updating, etc, and also its very unique GUI virtualization infrastructure.

FAQ (http://qubes-os.org/FAQ.html)

SBfreak
18.04.10, 13:01
So yes it's just another linux distribution.:happy:

Renk
18.04.10, 20:32
So yes it's just another linux distribution.:happy:


Maybe... It depends on what it's called a "linux distribution". But imo the way we call things does not so much matter. What's really matter imo, is what the things are, and what we can do with them.