After taking the nickle tour of #Qubes, my hasty conclusion is that it is anti-#KISS; there are seemingly many moving parts under the surface, and many scripts to grok to comprehend what is going on.

I plan to give it some more time, if only to unwrap how it launches programs in a VM and shares them with dom0's X server and audio and all that; perhaps it's easier than I think.

I also think #Xen is a bit overkill, as the claim is that it has a smaller kernel and therefore smaller attack surface than the seemingly superior alternative, #KVM. Doing some rudimentary searching out of identified / known VM escapes, there seem to be many more that impact Xen than KVM, in the first place.

Sure, the #Linux kernel may be considerably larger than the Xen kernel, but it does not need to be (a lot can be trimmed from the Linux kernel if you want a more secure hypervisor), and the Linux kernel is arguably more heavily audited than the Xen kernel.

My primary concern is compartmentalization of 'the web', which is the single greatest threat to my system's security, and while #firejail is a great soltion, I have run into issues maintaining my qutebrowser.local and firefox.local files tuned to work well, and it's not the simplest of solutions.

Qubes offers great solutions to the compartmentalization of data and so on, and for that, I really like it, but I think it's over-kill, even for people that desire and benefit from its potential security model, given what the threats are against modern workstations, regardless of threat actor -- most people (I HOPE) don't have numerous vulnerable services listening on random ports waiting to be compromised by a remote threat.

So I am working to refine my own security model, with the lessons I'm learning from Qubes.

Up to this point, my way of using a system is a bit different than most. I have 2 non-root users, neither has sudo access, so I do the criminal thing and use root directly in a virtual terminal.

One user is my admin user that has ssh keys to various other systems, and on those systems, that user has sudo access. My normal user has access to some hosts, but not all, and has no elevated privileges at all.

Both users occasionally need to use the web. When I first learned about javascript, years and years ago, it was a very benevolent tool. It could alter the web page a bit, and make popups and other "useful" things.

At some point, #javascript became a beast, a monster, something that was capable of scooping up your password database, your ssh keys, and probe your local networks with port scans.

In the name of convenience.

As a result, we have to take browser security more seriously, if we want to avoid compromise.

The path I'm exploring at the moment is to run a VM or two as a normal user, using KVM, and then using SSH X forwarding to run firefox from the VM which I can more easily firewall, and ensures if someone escapes my browser or abuses JS in a new and unique way, that no credentials are accessible, unless they are also capable of breaking out of the VM.

What else might I want to consider? I 'like' the concept of dom0 having zero network access, but I don't really see the threat actor that is stopping. Sure, if someone breaks from my VM, they can then call out to the internet, get a reverse shell, download some payloads or build tools, etc.

But if someone breaks out of a Qubes VM, they can basically do the same thing, right? Because they theoretically 'own' the hypervisor, and can restore network access to dom0 trivially, or otherwise get data onto it. Or am I mistaken?

Also, what would the #LXC / #LXD approach look like for something like this? What's its security record like, and would it provide an equivalent challenge to someone breaking out of a web browser (or other program I might use but am not thinking of at the moment)?