sandboxing is not the best practice on Linux… So I’m better off with Qubes than with Secureblue

No, no, no.

It’s no that sandboxing is the best practice, it’s just that attempting to “stack” linux sandboxes is mostly ineffective. If I run kvm inside xen, I get more security. If I run a linux container inside a linux container, I only get the benefit of one layer. But linux sandboxes are good practice.

I do agree that secureblue sucks, but I don’t understand your focus on Qubes. To elaborate on my criticisms let me explain, with a reply to this comment:

Many CVE’s for Xen were discovered and patched by the Qubes folks, so that’s a good thing…

If really, really care about security, it’s not enough to “find and patch CVE’s”. The architecture of the software must be organized in such a way that certain classes of vulnerabilities are impossible — so no CVE’s exist in the first place. Having a lack of separation between different privilege levels turns a normal bug into a critical security issue.

Xen having so many CVE’s shows that is has some clear architectural flaws, and that despite technically being a “microkernel”, the isolation between the components is not enough to prevent privilege isolation flaws.

Gvisor having very few CVE’s over it’s lifespan shows it has a better architecture. Same for OpenBSD — despite having a “monolithic” kernel, I would trust openbsd more in many cases (will elaborate later).

Now, let’s talk about threat model. Personally, I don’t really understand your fears in this thread. You visited a site, got literally jumpscared (not even phised), and are now looking at qubes? No actual exploit was done.

You need to understand that the sandboxing that browsers use is one of the most advanced in existence currently. Browser escapes are mostly impossible… mostly.

In addition, you need to know that excluding openbsd, gvisor, and a few other projects almost all other projects will have a regular outpouring of CVE’s at varying rates, depending on how well they are architectured.

Xen is one of those projects. Linux is one of those projects. Your browser is one of those projects. Although I consider Linux a tier below in security, I consider Xen and browsers to exist at a similar tier of security.

What I’m trying to say, is that any organization/entity that is keeping a browser sandbox escape, will most definitely have a Linux privilege escalation vulnerability, and will probably also have a Xen escape and escalation vulnerability.

The qube with the browser might get compromised, but dom0 would stay safely offline, that’s my ideal, not the utopic notion of never possibly getting attacked and hacked.

This is just false. Anybody who is able to do the very difficult task of compromising you through the browser will probably also be able to punch through Xen.

not the utopic notion of never possibly getting attacked and hacked.

This is true actually. Browser exploits are worth millions or even tens of millions of dollars. And they can only really be used a few times before someone catches them and reports them so that they are patched.

Why would someone spend tens of millions of dollars to compromise you? Do you have information worth millions of dollars on your computer? It’s not a “utopic notion”, it’s being realistic.

If you want maximum browser security, disable javascript use chromium on openbsd. Chromium has slightly stronger sandboxing than firefox, although chromium mostly outputs CVE’s at the same rate as firefox. Where it really shines, is when combined with Openbsd’s sandboxing (or grapheneos’ for phones).

Sure, you can run Xen under that setup. But there will be no benefit, you already have a stronger layer in front of Xen.

TLDR: Your entire security setup is only actually as strong as your strongest layer/shield. Adding more layers doesn’t really offer a benefit. But trying to add stronger layers is a waste of your time because you aren’t a target.

Proxmox is based on debian and uses debian under the hood…

to answer your first question, kind of. Gvisor (by google btw) uses the linux kernels sandboxing to sandbox the gvisor process itself.

Distrobox also uses the linux kernels sandboxing, which is how linux based containers work.

Due to issues with the attack surface of the linux’s kernels sandboxing components, the ability to create sandboxing or containers inside sandboxes or containers is usually restricted.

What this means is that to use gvisor inside docker/podman (distrobox) you must either loosen the (kinda nonexistent) distrobox sandbox, or you must disable gvisors sandboxing that it applies to itself. You lose the benefit, and you would be better off just using gvisor alone.

It’s complicated, but basically the linux’s kernels containers/sandboxing features can’t really be “stacked”.

I remember I fit binding of isaac and an archlinux install into 10 gigs of storage using btrfs transparent compression.

The computer was a craptop with only 32 gigs of flash storage overall.

Care to elaborate? Proxmox’s paid tier is long term support for their older releaes, and paid support. The main code is entirely free, with no features gated behind paywalls or anything like that.

Check out turbowarp, an ultra fast reimplementation of scratch.

I’ve seen games that only worked in turbowarp.

Custom editors are probably needed.

https://github.com/trelby/trelby ?

https://trelby.org/

Found here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications/Documents#Screenwriting

Kde’s spectacle (screenshot utility) does this by default now.

I don’t see any mention of games so far.

A minecraft server is always a good time with friends, and there are hundreds of other game servers you can self host.

Syd3, and gvisor, a similar project in go aren’t really sandboxes but instead user mode emulation of the linux kernel. I consider them more secure than virtual machines because code that programs run is not directly executed on your cpu.

Although syd3 doesn’t seem to emulate every syscall, only some, I know rhat gvisor does emulate every syscall.

If you compare CVE’s for gvisor and CVE’s for xen/kvm, you’ll see that they are worlds apart.

Xen has 25 pages: https://app.opencve.io/cve/?vendor=xen

Gvisor has 1: https://app.opencve.io/cve/?q=gvisor

Now, gvisor is a much newer product, but it is still a full 7 years old compared to xen’s 22 years of history. For something that is a third of the age, it has 1/25th of the cve’s.

There is a very real argument to be made that the hardened openbsd kernel, when combined with openbsd’s sandboxing, is more secure than xen, which you brought up.

I don’t know what the commenter you replied to is talking about, but systemd has it’s own firewalling and sandboxing capabilities. They probably mean that they don’t use docker for deployment of services at all.

Here is a blogpost about systemd’s firewall capabilities: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/systemd-application-firewall.html

Here is a blogpost about systemd’s sandboxing: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/mastering-systemd

Here is the archwiki’s docs about drop in units: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd#Drop-in_files

I can understand why someone would like this, but this seems like a lot to learn and configure, whereas podman/docker deny most capabilities and network permissions by default.

Is your flux config public?

99.9999% of freecell games are winnable. Very nice, and one of the reasons I preferred freecell.

https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy/

WARNING: Code licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) MUST NOT be used at Google.

Despite all the warnings not to install kali linux, I decided to install kali linux and I am now encountering an issue I would not face had I chosen to use a linux distro designed with normal desktop use in mind. Can anyone help me?

Actually, modern kali is a lot more usable than the older kali. Kali used to only have a root user, so chromium and electron apps wouldn’t start since they don’t run as root.

Despite this, nowadays I generally recommend new people away from kali, because I believe the process of installing the tools that kali provides on other distros is a valuable learning experience.

Kali is great for the professional, but but learners I prefer they get to experience the package manager or other aspects of system management.

UWP 💀

UWP is Microsoft’s “new” app format, it’s what the windows store and the xbox use.

It also isn’t compatable with wine, and my pet theory is that this was the entire point of it. Combined with Windows S mode, which doesn’t let you install apps other than from the windows store, the goal was to lock down the windows ecosystem by having apps that can’t be made to run on linux.

I remember seeing a compatability layer for UWP apps a while ago, and I am pleased to see that it has come this far. Great work!

Edit: wait this uses a windows VM. Still good though and lets people escape the windows ecosystem.

As simpler and easier to use alternatives, check out voidauth and kanidm.

Both have products with varying degrees of quality. Don’t follow companies around, follow specific named model lines instead.

I don’t really understand why this is a concern with docker. Are there any particular features you want from version 29 that version 26 doesn’t offer?

The entire point of docker is that it doesn’t really matter what version of docker you have, the containers can still run.

Debian’s version of docker receives security updates in a timely manner, which should be enough.

I recommend libvirt + virt-manager as an alternative to hyper v.

The cool thing about virt manager is you can do it over ssh.