Contents VS birdcage

I've been using Qubes for the past 2 years while going to school, and I found it really fun and helpful. A lot of professors had me download random closed source software from random websites during the pandemic, and it was easier to download it to a VM than to convince them about Free Software. More than that though it's been really helpful just for my own workflow. I can hit a keybind and start working from essentially a fresh linux install. It's easier to stay on task when each VM is designed to only do one kind of task. It's also nice having debian, fedora, windows, kali, and whonix all easily accessible on the same machine.

The main sticking point for me is that Qubes is reasonably secure from _myself_. I make mistakes. I first started using linux with an Ubuntu install that I broke a year later because I accidentally added in a space when typing `rm -rf ~/Arduino` which made it `rm -rf ~ /Arduino`. On Qubes I can `sudo rm -rf /` on the VM I'm using right now and not break a sweat. I have a keybind to spawn a disposable "airgapped" VM to deal with sensitive or untrusted data, and it helps knowing that even if I mess up with whatever I'm doing, the VM will keep everything reasonably contained.

Some cool things that Qubes has outside of just VMs are its features enabled by the communication between VMs. Notable ones are Split GPG (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/split-gpg/) which let you use a VM as if it were a smartcard for GPG and Split SSH (https://github.com/Qubes-Community/Contents/blob/master/docs...) which let you isolate your private SSH keys from your VM running your SSH client.

There are some sticking points around Qubes. For instance, I use Tailscale to connect my computers to each other from anywhere. Tailscale's install scripts add their keys to my VM's package manager for updates and installs. The proper way to do this in Qubes is to clone a TemplateVM, run Tailscale's install script, update, install, and then base an AppVM off of it. But that creates an entire new OS taking up storage and requiring updates. You can hack a way around this in an AppVM which saves a considerable amount of space, but it takes a lot of upfront time to do and requires you to manually update it.

Another sticking point is hardware acceleration. The desktop environment has access to hardware acceleration, so it runs fine, but opening videos in AppVMs is all software decoded. I'm on a Thinkpad T580 and it can run 1080p videos, but the fans turn on and can't do 4K. When I want to game or do something GPU heavy I either stream from my tower or completely switch over.

Overall, I'm really happy with Qubes and I'm planning to stick with it on my laptops.

I can't speak to 17+ GPUs - but have successfully passed through a single high-end GPU for gaming via following these instructions: https://github.com/Qubes-Community/Contents/blob/master/docs/customization/gaming-hvm.md

Yes its possible. But check here under "Audio Support", also says at the bottom that windows 7, 10 & 11 are fully supported. As for how to install Windows, here. And installing Windows 11 by disabling the TPM check: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/windows-11-in-qubes/6759/8.

Follow this guide https://github.com/Qubes-Community/Contents/blob/master/docs/configuration/vpn.md

Co-funder @ Phylum here (https://phylum.io) We have been actively scanning dependencies across npm (and PyPI, RubyGems, Crates.io, etc.) for nearly three years now; quite successfully, I might add (https://blog.phylum.io/tag/research/). We _automatically_ hit on this package when it was published, and our research team has been all over it.

A collective of us are active in Discord (https://discord.gg/Fe6pr5eW6p), continuing to hunt attacks like these. If that's something that interests you, we'd love to have you!

In addition to this, we've released several open source tools to help protect against supply chain attacks:

1. https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage - Birdcage is a cross-platform embeddable sandbox that's been baked into our CLI (which wraps npm, pypi, etc.) to sandbox package installations

2. https://github.com/phylum-dev/cli - Our CLI provides an extension capability so you can lock down random executables you might use during your software development (define _what_ it's allowed to do, e.g. network access, and then lock it down with Birdcage)

We also have a variety of integrations, including Github, Gitlab, BitBucket, CircleCI, Tines, Sophos, etc.

https://docs.phylum.io/docs/integrations_overview

It's unfortunate that software dependency attacks continue to plague open source registries. It seems unlikely this will let up in the near future. We are continuing to work closely with the open source ecosystems to try and get these sorts of packages removed when they pop up.

To be clear, this particular package did not execute code during install, so the sandbox wouldn't have come into play, but it would have been blocked by the pre-check against Phylum's API.

Would greatly appreciate any feedback on our extensions and suggestions for improving our sandbox! We recently had a few individuals submit some great issues and suggestions, which we absolutely loved receiving.

Happy to answer any questions about software supply chain attacks or security in general!

1. https://blog.phylum.io/junes-sophisticated-npm-attack-attrib...

2. https://blog.phylum.io/rust-malware-staged-on-crates-io/

3. https://blog.phylum.io/npm-emails-validator-package-malware/

4. https://github.com/phylum-dev/cli

5. https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage

We're actively working on this with our sandbox (https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage). We've wrapped the likes of pip, yarn, and npm already and are making moves to similarly provide support for cargo.

Currently comes as part of the Phylum CLI (https://github.com/phylum-dev/cli), so that doing something like:

    phylum npm install 

We (https://phylum.io) actually open sourced our sandbox for this exact purpose.

https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage

It's baked into our CLI and supports limiting access to network, disk, etc. during package installation. For example, running something like

    phylum npm install react

We've open sourced our sandbox, which limits access to network/disk/etc. during package installation. In this way, nasty install scripts won't have the opportunity to ship your credentials/SSH keys off to a remote sever.

The sandbox is also open source and available for use by the community.

In addition to this, taking precautions to not install unknown packages is probably also extremely prudent. Towards that end, we've open sourced a cross platform embeddable sandbox for package installations. Source is freely available on Github (https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage) and we've added it into our tooling so you can run pip install ... and it'll limit access to disk, network, etc. during package installation.

Been working on this exact thing for nearly two years at https://www.phylum.io. We identified and reported about 1.2k packages in ecosystems like npm, pypi and others last year. GitHub app that checks your PRs for malware. We also built a free open source sandbox for package installations [1] so if malware does get executed it’s done in a locked down environment. Happy to chat further about this sort of thing, it’s something I’m wildly interested in!

[1] https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders at Phylum)

Our system has been alerting us to this actor's activities all morning (beginning sometime last night). They have been wildly active, and have continued to publish packages as we've worked to get them removed.

Interestingly, they have ported the Python bits to Javascript and have started publishing to NPM as well. Exact same TTP, crossing two ecosystems.

Our platform monitors these ecosystems, scanning packages for signs of risk as they are published. This way we can get them removed before they impact the wider open source community. We currently support Javascript, Typescript, Python, Ruby, Java, C# and recently just rolled out Golang and Rust support into beta.

We believe in a defense in depth approach to supply chain security and have also published an open source sandbox that limits access to the filesystem, network, disk and environment variables.

https://github.com/phylum-dev/birdcage

This is rolled into our CLI so that you can do things like `phylum npm install ` and install packages in a sandboxed way.

Happy to answer questions about this attack, security, sandboxes, etc!