qubes_security_level service

[marmarek]

Reported by joanna on 6 Apr 2010 17:10 UTC
...and display a warning to the user, that e.g. without IOMMU/VT-d there is no point of having a NetVM, as it cannot be securely isolated on a system without VT-d.

Migrated-From: https://wiki.qubes-os.org/ticket/6

[marmarek]

Modified by joanna on 14 Mar 2011 21:26 UTC

[marmarek]

Comment by joanna on 11 Apr 2011 12:20 UTC
Also present an option to enable VT-d.

Also, our installer should generate two grub entries:

• Qubes
• Qubes (IOMMU/VT-d enabled)

By default we should be booting without iommu (because it often causes problems with incompatible GPUs), but always display a warning when we figure out IOMMU is not supported or not enabled.

[marmarek]

Modified by joanna on 28 May 2011 09:04 UTC

[marmarek]

Comment by joanna on 25 Sep 2011 10:50 UTC
We should have a service called qubes_security_level that would be the last init.d service started in Dom0. This service's task would be to evaluate the level of security based on current platform config. Currently this would be just the availability of the VT-d. In the future we would add more criteria, such as:

• is also Interrupt Remapping enabled?
• is full screen for AppVMs allowed by guid or not?
• has the system been started using TPM-based trusted boot (Anti Evil Maid) or not?
• is the whole filesystem encrypted or not?
• etc...

Also, we should have a little app (or part of the qubes manager) that would be displaying an icon in the tray that would be representing the current security level (a number from 1-5, coloured from red to green/blue). When user clicks on the icon we should display a quick explanation what factors contributed to given security level.

[marmarek]

Modified by joanna on 25 Sep 2011 10:51 UTC

[marmarek]

Comment by joanna on 19 Oct 2011 08:59 UTC
This is currently tricky to implement, because we don't know how to implement "stickiness" of the variable that holds the level -- it should be possible to ensure that once the user "lowers" the security level, e.g. by booting the system with VT-d disabled, then the level will never get back to the previously high level.

So, currently we can just add some trivial indicator e.g. to Qubes Manager -- TBD.

[marmarek]

Modified by joanna on 8 Oct 2012 09:23 UTC

[marmarek]

Modified by joanna on 12 Mar 2013 10:27 UTC

[marmarek]

Modified by joanna on 1 Aug 2013 12:51 UTC

[rootkovska]

Now tracked as part of the #2134.