April 9, 2010 at 05:38Joanna Rutkovskaya introduced the alpha version of Qubes OS
Joanna Rutkovskaya, founder and head of Invisible Things Lab, introduced her company's new product - the Qubes operating system. Qubes is designed to provide a high level of security. The main feature of the operating system is the use of virtualization technology to isolate different programs and even different system components from each other.
The user can create different security domains implemented as small virtual machines - AppVMs. You can highlight individual AppVMs, for example, for personal data, work, purchases, banking. Applications running in a separate domain can in no way affect other domains and the underlying system. Of course, secure copy-paste and file sharing between different AppVMs are supported.
Qubes is based on the Xen hypervisor, the X windowing interface, and the Linux kernel. It is Xen that is used, and not, for example, KVM, because the developers are confident that the architecture of Xen allows you to create more secure systems.
It is argued that in Qubes you can run most Linux applications and use most Linux drivers. In the future, support for Windows applications is also expected.
Qubes is still at the alpha stage, but it can already be used, according to Joanna. She switched to Qubes about a month ago and uses it for work, shopping, banking, just for working on the Internet, and even for developing Qubes itself. However, she recalls that since this is alpha, no one has canceled the need for regular data backup. By the end of 2010, it is planned to release a stable release version.
The operating system was developed by Rutkovskaya and Rafal Voitchuk. Rafal wrote the GUI virtualization code, and everything else was Joanna.