Running Whonix on top of Qubes OS, anyone interested?

[adrelanos]

Hi,

you may have heard about Whonix (anonymous operating system) [1].

Is anyone interested to port Whonix to run on top of Qubes OS?

It shouldn't be very hard. I blogged about it. [2]

Cheers,
adrelanos

[1] http://whonix.sf.net
[2]
https://sourceforge.net/p/whonix/featureblog/2013/02/running-whonix-on-top-of-qubes-os-anyone-interested-unpacking-ova-images/

[syd bris]

It would be interesting to see how well it works. But for me the images are too big to conveniently download. I can only just manage qubes downloads :)

[syd bris]

I decided to give this a try. The download speed wasn't too bad at
all. However, qubes doesn't have the qemu-img conversion tool. And on
another os there were problems in converting the images, as shown
below:

knoppix@Microknoppix:/media/sdc1$ qemu-img convert
Whonix-Gateway-disk1.vmdk -O raw Whonix-Gateway.img
qemu-img: error while reading sector 131072: Invalid argument
knoppix@Microknoppix:/media/sdc1$ qemu-img convert
Whonix-Workstation-disk1.vmdk -O raw Whonix-Workstation.img
qemu-img: The image size is too large for file format 'raw'

So if you want qubes people to use whonix it would be best to package
it within a distro smaller than debian. Maybe this would not be a
security problem because qubes provides the underlying security? or
you could use a smaller "hardened" distro to package it with?

[Joanna Rutkowska]

On 03/15/13 00:02, syd bris wrote:
> I decided to give this a try. The download speed wasn't too bad at
> all. However, qubes doesn't have the qemu-img conversion tool.

It surely does -- try this (in a VM):

[user@work-pub ~]$ sudo yum install qemu-img

I actually successfully used it to move some of my VMWare Fusion VMs to
Qubes HVMs (these were some Ubuntus I use for my robots and other lab
stuff).

/.../

> So if you want qubes people to use whonix it would be best to package
> it within a distro smaller than debian. Maybe this would not be a
> security problem because qubes provides the underlying security?

What do you mean by "underlying security"? Qubes won't automagically
make your VM safer than it normally is...

joanna.