Using a cloud to manage a cloud
summary
OrionVM runs QubesOS for three years to manage sysadmin tasks, using Xen VMs for each role and Dom0 as the GUI management surface; they isolate networks so one VM can hold a single customer VPN while another has only internet, and they keep secrets in a vault VM with no internet or PCIe. They build a trusted PDF pipeline that renders pages to bitmaps then re-encodes them to avoid exploitable parsers, rely on IOMMU USB device isolation, and recommend Intel iGPU, lots of RAM and ThinkPads with coreboot/Heads.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:58Threat model
- 4:35Is it usable?
- 5:06Firefox and a password manager
- 6:57Network isolation
- 8:16Vault isolation
- 12:55USB isolation
- 14:06Hardware isolation
- 14:17Qubes video call
- 14:39Disposable qube
- 15:30Convert to trusted PDF
- 16:28Qube Manager
- 17:42Help wanted
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