xdma
xdma on Hacker News
Yeah, we agree, actually. Tor probably won't even be the default. We are adding flexibility to network support right now. Soon you'll be able to have just cleartext SGOS, or be able to send sandboxed apps through different paths: one app might exit through a VPN, another through Tor only, another through i2p maybe, etc, enforced by the sandbox.
When the domain was registered by me and idea originally hatched, the vision was to have the company focused on reverse engineering and the application to it of ideas from graph theory. But things change. Name stuck.
It was drawn by hand using a vector illustrations tool, based on a sketch that I had made. We think it is very cool and will produce more conceptual illustration in this style.
The artist goes by Sephy Ka: http://www.sephyka.com/box-stories/
No, Qubes hasn't written the TLS client handshake proxy to enforce the policy. Out of scope. That's what I meant, and it's just one example of the things above the level of "Qubes" or "Oz" plumbing that makes Subgraph OS what it is.
It's a desktop OS, and the hardened kernel is an important part of the project (i.e. no docker image).
We use Xpra to do desktop isolation for now, by the way. It's similar to Qubes' display mechanism, but we didn't write it, and don't really like it as a security control. Just serves as PoC until we can jump to Walyand.
Therefore Subgraph OS isn't in the worst possible x11 situation, which is the default for every desktop Linux except I think the most recently released Fedora.
Re: iso / updates, we have rolling updates. Installed users are kept current if they install the OS and regularly apply updates and do dist-upgrades.
It was me, at Subgraph, that setup the Secure Desktops mailing list and website. We hope to collaborate more with other projects in the future. There is already interest from other projects in things we've built for Subgraph.
As for Subgraph in Qubes, being a template OS, etc, maybe later? We haven't even had a real release yet and are still building. I wouldn't recommend it anyways unless all of the Qubes VMs have hardened kernels by default.
Subgraph does lots of things Qubes doesn't, and this will only increase over time. For example: an experimental Subgraph OS feature[1] is to, by mandatory sandbox policy, prevent a specific application from connecting to anything except TLS endpoints, or
specific TLS endpoints while adding certificate pinning outside of an application and performing extra-app validation. Could be useful over Tor or public wi-fi, right? Qubes is not going to build this, yet I am running a prototype of it on my SGOS dev laptop.
You can compare the sandbox technologies: hypervisor vs. Linux kernel containment facilities, but we are doing a lot more than that. There's no doubt that there will be many that want to run Subgraph or parts of Subgraph inside of Qubes for this reason, though we believe Qubes needs strong exploit mitigation throughout, in every VM, and I think wouldn't recommend it until that is the default.
1. Screenshots of Oz' coming TLS Guard, which proxies the TLS handshake to ensure correct TLS session & enforce other policy req's:
https://twitter.com/attractr/status/783013051335319553
https://twitter.com/attractr/status/783521883715203073
https://twitter.com/attractr/status/786235879111090176
etc
(edited, formatting)
These are great questions. We have a Gnome shell plug-in to move files into sandboxes while an application is running. Certain applications also have shared directories (e.g. "Downloads/TorBrowser", "Documents/LibreOffice"). This is a UX work in progress though, neither of these are adequate, though together they're workable.
re: Applications and network access: we have an application firewall, unique to Linux-based OSs. It's basically Little Snitch for Linux. There is a screenshot here:
Keep in mind that the project is very young. We are just getting started, tbh. With questions like these you should idle in our IRC channel where we talk about all of this stuff: OFTC/#subgraph.
You can install/run the downloadable image in a VM. Lots of people do. We test with VMWare Fusion/kvm/Virtual Box.
Yup. Subgraph is a nearly 7 year old open source software company. We wrote a web scanner (Vega) that's sadly neglected, though still used regularly by thousands of users. We also do consulting, like pentesting, etc.
The name was inspired by work I was following at the time (10 years ago?) by Halvar Flake etc, on applying graph theory methods to reverse engineering / runtime analysis.
The new ISO is coming very soon. We've just been busy with consulting we do to support the project and there were some issues with gpg2.
Wayland is one huge reason why we aren't even calling this "beta". Wayland is absolutely part of the plan. We are working on integration now.
Flatpaks: probably not. Different vision. Flatpak is an 'appstore' type model, not sure we will want that in Subgraph OS, but it's worth a deeper investigation than the thought I've given it so far. There are things in Flatpak that we can benefit from, such as the UI advantages of "Portals". We'll probably be adding support for it to Oz.
Hi, I'm an SGOS dev. I don't know what you mean by "mostly a patched Linux", but here's what Subgraph OS is so far -- and it's a young project: we have a kernel patched with grsec/PaX/RAP, but we have also developed our own application sandbox framework (namespaces + limited fs + seccomp bpf whitelisting), app firewall, event monitoring subsystem, usb disable on desktop lock (based on grsec), etc. Here's a walkthrough of our sandbox framework:
https://github.com/subgraph/oz/wiki/Oz-Technical-Details