Contents VS cli

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.

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 

cli - uses sandbox to block packages during installation, performs pre-install checks to determine (by hitting the API) if the package performs actions congruent with malware, e.g. phylum pip install requests will use pip wrapped by the sandbox to install requests after verifying that it doesn't have malware like behavior.

This is bundled with our CLI tool today (which is also open source) and allows you to install packages with phylum npm install . We currently support npm, yarn and pip and are planning on rolling out further support for other ecosystems in coming months.

We open sourced our tooling to help with this problem specifically. We have an extension framework that wraps npm for three purposes:

Our CLI tool (also open source and free) will check for typosquats, dependency confusion, malicious code, vulnerabilities, etc. in your package dependencies. Works for pypi, npm, rubygems, maven, nuget and very recently golang and rust crates.

This is built into the Phylum CLI so you can do things like:

This is one of the projects we're working on (and open sourcing)!

Currently allows you to specify allowed resources during the package installation in a way very similar to what you've outlined [1].

The sandbox itself lives here [2] and can be integrated into other projects.

1. https://github.com/phylum-dev/cli/blob/main/extensions/npm/P...

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

We will start here with a slightly more in-depth, custom version of the existing NPM shim extension - a tool that enforces default project policy when installing NPM packages. This custom extension will do some additional custom validation before allowing the installation process to continue.