Portable external laptop monitors?

[Jean-Philippe Ouellet]

Hello,

I'm curious if anyone has tried using any portable eternal laptop
monitors in Qubes, like the DisplayLink-powered USB ones?

Some examples of the kind of monitors I'm talking about:
- ASUS MB169B+ -- https://www.asus.com/uk/Monitors/MB169BPlus/
- ASUS ZenScreen MB16AC -- https://www.asus.com/us/Monitors/MB16AC/
- AOC E1659FWU -- http://us.aoc.com/en/products/e1659fwu

They seem appealing to me because it seems they can get power and
signal from a single USB port, and be easily thrown in a laptop bag.
These all seem to be driven by DisplayLink [1], which seems to have at
least some WIP linux support.

Of course, having your *output* devices also attached via your
ideally-untrusted USB controller opens up a whole new world of
possibilities not previously reasoned about in my threat modeling,
especially on laptops where the input devices are rather unfortunately
internally attached via only the same single USB controller, but it
would definitely be an interesting possibility to explore regardless!

Has anyone tried such devices? Anything interesting to report with
respect to Qubes support, or even just Linux support generally?

There would of course be lots of details to figure out, but I would
ultimately be interested in passing through such a device to a
only-partially-trusted USB/GUI VM which could only view/render a
subset of my graphics, thus allowing me to benefit from the extra
screen real-estate for non-sensitive work while still trying to ensure
that I could not accidentally allow a malicious monitor to e.g.
screen-scrape my vault VMs, as well as isolate dom0 from exploits in
the USB/graphics stack. There is at least some communication from a
display back to a host [2][3] (and almost certainly more that I am
unaware of), and I bet there are some interesting and unexplored
potential attack vectors for a malicious display trying to compromise
an attached host.

Regards,
Jean-Philippe

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayLink
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Display_Identification_Data
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel

[Yethal]

I'd avoid displaylink devices altogether, even their windows drivers only work half the time. If you're lookibg for a portable monitor then Gechic makes such devices, they have hdmi inputs that should work ootb with Qubes.