As we know there are a hundred Linux distributions that we can find on the web and today we see the the one called Qubes OS, which is an operating system specifically oriented to protect our security and privacy. Qubes OS is a completely free and open source operating system, that means that anyone can freely use it, copy it and even make changes to its source code.
In the field of security we have more examples, such as Tails or Kali, which however have nothing to do with each other. While Kali is designed as a toolbox for the security professional, but does not improve system security for the user, Qubes OS does it the other way around, providing a system (based on Fedora) that tries to be as secure as possible for the user through an approach to safety by isolation. The concept is based on the idea that there is no perfect system, so to increase security it isolates the activities that the user executes in different profiles.
This Distro provides us with the security and privacy we need when surfing the Internet because it is responsible for executing the different software in individual compartments, thus, it executes the different programs in small isolated virtual machines. In this way, if one of those virtual machines is compromised, it will not be able to compromise the rest, it will not affect them. This layered architecture is ideal for example to navigate through unsecured websites, while we are otherwise browsing on our online bank or email page.
Qubes OS runs on level 1 of the hypervisor called Xen, that is, directly on the hardware, and not like VMware or VirtualBox that runs on level 2. This means that Qubes OS protects us in the event that a attacker is able to compromise the hypervisor and gain control of the entire system. In this way, Qubes OS runs multiple virtual machines at level 1 to provide the highest possible security.
In a way, Qubes OS proposes an extreme sandboxing system, whose difference with applications that use sandboxing or with creating several virtual machines in the system is that Qubes OS executes everything virtualized through the Xen hypervisor, the monitor with which to create and manage virtual machines, sharing physical resources, but in isolation and with a cohesive user experience.
The merit of Qubes OS is, in short, to greatly facilitate the use of Xen in a desktop operating system by offering a fairly advanced level of security when browsing the web, something that is very important to us.
See also:
Kali Linux, the distribution based on Debian
BlackArch Linux, the computer security distribution
