Is Qubes OS Right for Me?
Judging by the title, it's already clear what this is about. My desire to write this review was prompted by the great interest of the audience in "cubes." Here’s one of the latest messages from a subscriber on this topic:
Good day, are you planning to create at least a separate mini-course on using the Qubes OS system? Such a course would be very useful for me, and I’m sure for others as well. I want to switch to Qubes, but I really don’t want to deal with a lot of hassle; that’s the only thing holding me back. I don’t consider myself a super advanced user, but I know a thing or two.
Anonymous
Well then - let’s start from the beginning.
What is it and why? In simple terms.
Qubes OS is an operating system focused on security. It provides this security through isolation. This means that each significant process is isolated from one another. This is facilitated by the Xen hypervisor, and in simple terms - each process is implemented in a separate virtual machine. What does this give us? If one of the virtual machines is "hacked," the negative consequences will be limited to the boundaries of that virtual machine (though theoretically, the hypervisor itself can also be hacked).
In practice - you have several virtual machines. In one, there’s a browser that you use for work. In another virtual machine, there’s a Tor router that you use to anonymize some of the virtual machines, and in the third, you have, for example, a separate distribution of Kali Linux where you hone your pentesting skills. But here’s the problem - when you were playing around in Kali, at one point, something went wrong. More experienced guys took you as bait and threw a malware at you that feels right at home in Kali (a rootkit). Bad. But in your case, it’s tolerable, as all the nastiness from the bad guys will remain in the Kali virtual machine, and the other processes will not be affected by the malware. And this incident can be resolved, at worst, by simply deleting the infected virtual machine. The End.
It’s worth noting that the principle of ensuring security through isolation is not only implemented by Qubes. This is also practiced by a distribution like Whonix, which some of you have probably heard of. Just remember that Qubes is a full-fledged distribution that you install as the main OS on your PC, while Whonix is provided in the form of virtual machines (exclusively a guest OS based on Debian), which can only be worked with from another host - for example, from within Qubes.