Rutkowska invited the security community to try to break Qubes and even pointed to a page that lists where the operating system's critical code is located.īecause it is based on Linux, Qubes can run most Linux applications. In fact, during the development stage, researchers working on the project found three critical vulnerabilities that could have impacted the operating system's security - one in code they wrote themselves and two in hardware from Intel. That doesn't mean that Qubes is guaranteed to be free of security flaws. "And, of course, in the first place, we tried to minimize the amount of those trusted parts, in which Qubes really stands out, I think." "In Qubes OS we took a practical approach and we have tried to focus on all those sensitive parts of the OS, and to make them reasonably secure," Rutkowska said. However, the developers have tried to limit the amount of code that could have critical security vulnerabilities. Qubes is based on Linux, the X Window System and the Xen hypervisor - a virtual machine manager. "People should realize that by mere fact of using Qubes OS they won't become automatically more secure - it's how they are going to use it might make them significantly more secure," Rutkowska said. "I realize this might be a tricky part for some users and some usage scenarios, yet, on the other hand, this seems to be the most flexible and powerful approach we could provide." How users are going to take advantage of Qubes' application isolation capabilities is entirely up to them, Rutkowska said. Because of this, users are expected to be able to take security decisions on their own, like what security domains to create, what restrictions to apply to them and what applications to run inside each of them.
However, Qubes offers more flexibility and doesn't rely as much on security choices made by its developers. The Qubes security model is somewhat similar to that of iOS or Android, operating systems that also isolate applications inside a sandbox and ask users to grant them different permissions. Users can also create so-called "disposable VMs" for opening files from untrusted sources or performing other one-time tasks that might pose security risks.
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