From what I've been hearing they seem to already have big customers using it. I wonder if it'll ever be available to individuals and small businesses.
It's pretty cool in that it appears to have some tripwire-esque stuff so that you get useful logs when malware does try to do dodgy things in their sandbox. It sounds like it can alert the user with something like, "your browser might be compromised, start a new session" and everything is captured/saved so that admins can come back later to do forensics with the session that went bad.
Might want to check out spoon.net - they are working on containers for Windows. Been doing app virt for a long time. I use them for side by side browser testing : )
I think I've seen this before, in a post somewhere by one of their developers. I think it was about how insecure X11 is, because any X11 app can listen for all keystrokes made by the user. AFAIK people jumped on that post as "it's a known property of X11, stop making drama about it."
While I am all for virtualizing, it doesn't help security. It just moves the exploit from your OS into your hypervisor. Even worse, you add a whole new level of exploitable code.
Of course it improves security. On Qubes, someone who can exploit your browser (pdf reader, word processor) doesn't automatically get free rein on your machine. They still need to escape Xen.
This would be sound logic if existing desktop operating systems had actual good security models.
In the real world, if someone exploits your PDF reader, they don't have to circumvent your OS: your OS hands over everything you can access, by design. One could argue that a better security model baked into the OS would make more sense than a virtualization hack, but the latter has the advantage of actually existing.
I'm confused. The original person I responded to said that no desktop OSes had good security models. On OSX I can write a script that, when run as a user, has access to everything the user has access to. So what exactly are you talking about?
That's nonsense. It doesn't automatically help security.
But compartmentalization does mean that barring a hypervisor exploit, each exploit can potentially be prevented from affecting more than a small part of the system.
I care a whole lot less if Chrome is exploited if it can't access my ssh keys, for example (not that I wouldn't still care, but the potential damage would be limited).
I'd say the reasoning is that you then have to trust there are no privesc/bypass opportunities in your environment. Trusting that all your dbus/pulseaudio/network-manager/cups/fuse/display manager & friends aren't going to give your rogue chrome process on one account some kind of access to another (thanks to X11/XDMCP, they'll at least have keylogging) - that's a big surface area, aas in: space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
Compared to the few hundred lines in the hypervisor providing VM-level isolation you'd be a bit mad to say that these are equivalent means of isolation.
The difference here is, you might feel safer but you are still in the exact same position as before, a bug in your hypervisor/Meta-OS screws you. I'd argue that is a harmful comfort.
