[clug] Talk Proposal: QubesOS

[Steven Hanley]

Hi Paul

Looking forward to it, next month would be awesome as we discussed last
night (Thursday July 23rd).

	See You
	    Steve

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 11:05:30AM +1000, Paul Harvey wrote:
> I've been using QubesOS https://www.qubes-os.org/ for over 6 months,
> and although it's complicated my life a little, I now feel naked
> without it!
> 
> I'd like to talk about why Qubes is more than just a bunch of VMs:
> - Helps mitigate against hostile USB devices (I'll bring a USB rubber
> ducky configured for hostility, just to demonstrate)
> - Helps contain malicious PDFs and (eventually) other documents
> - Helps mitigate flaws inherent in the now decades-old
> design/architecture of X11, while at the same time giving a unique,
> somewhat seamless GUI experience for running different apps in
> different VMs
> - Helps contain exploits that might occur in kernel network drivers
> - Helps reduce the scope of malware impact by containing its influence
> to just a few filesystem locations that actually persist across AppVM
> reboots: Eg. /home and /usr/local directories (the rest of the root
> filesystem usually comes from a template rootfs that's instantiated on
> every AppVM start)
> - Provides a neat point & click way to chain different networking VMs
> together in front of any of your AppVMs (firewall, IDS, proxy, Tor,
> etc)
> - Improves memory utilization by using fancy xen stuff to
> share/release free memory among running AppVMs
> 
> ... among other things (now that I've written that list perhaps I
> should work on cutting it back a bit).
> 
> I'm used to giving 30-45min talks, but let me know the best format for
> CLUG: obviously there's a lot of rabbit holes in Qubes and Xen that
> could individually take up 30mins by themselves, I'd like to keep it
> at the level of "here's a thing that lets you have more control over,
> and confidence in your computing environment".
> 
> My goal is that you should come away from this talk knowing that there
> is a better way to compartmentalize your computing than just running a
> bunch of VMs :)
> -- 
> linux mailing list
> linux at lists.samba.org
> https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/linux

-- 
Steven Hanley sjh at svana.org http://svana.org/sjh/diary
then she is wet behind the ears and wafting down the avenue
pre-rush hour, post-rain shower
stillness seeping upwards like steam
   Tamburitza Lingua - Revelling - Ani