Release candidate secure ‘virtualization OS’ Qubes comes out

The research company Invisible Things Lab has released the first release candidate of the secure operating system Qubes. This operating system secures applications by running them in virtual machines.

Polish root kit expert Joanna Rutkowska announces on her blog the first release version of Qubes OS. The founder of the company Invisible Things Lab became known in 2008 for the development of the rootkit Blue Pill. With this rootkit, an operating system can be hidden in a virtual machine thanks to hardware virtualization, so that important system information can be intercepted undetectable. Knowledge gathered in the creation of the root kit has been used in the development of the operating system.

Qubes is an operating system in which applications are each assigned their own virtual machine. The application then runs in this virtual machine, so that vulnerabilities in the software cannot be used to access other parts of the system. Also at the system level, processes such as network connections and the file system are virtualized so that in the event of an attack, the system component can be shut down, while the system remains intact.

The operating system is based on virtualization software Xen within a Linux environment. The first beta was released in April 2011. Since March 2012, it is possible to run Windows applications in the operating system in addition to Linux applications. New in this version is, among other things, the graphical interface to set up the virtual machines. The virtual machines in this version are based on Fedora 17. Interested users can download an iso file to download and install. The makers call on users to report problems via the mailing list, so that they can be solved before the release of Qubes 1.0.