Fedora 31 approaching EOL
https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2020/10/27/fedora-31-approaching-eol/

Fedora 33 was released today (https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-33/), 2020-10-27. According to the Fedora
Release Life Cycle (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Release_Life_Cycle), this means that Fedora 31 is scheduled to reach
EOL (end-of-life (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/End_of_life)) in approximately four weeks, around 2020-11-24 (https://www.timeanddate.com/date/dateadded.html?m1=10&d1=27&y1=2020&type=add&ay=&am=&aw=4&ad=&rec=).

We strongly recommend that all Qubes users upgrade their Fedora 31
TemplateVMs and StandaloneVMs to Fedora 32 or higher before Fedora 31
reaches EOL. We provide step-by-step upgrade instructions for upgrading
Fedora TemplateVMs (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/template/fedora/upgrade/). For a complete list of TemplateVM versions
supported for your specific version of Qubes, see Supported TemplateVM
Versions (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/supported-versions/#templatevms).

We also provide a fresh Fedora 32 TemplateVM package through the
official Qubes repositories, which you can install in dom0 by following
the standard installation instructions (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/fedora/#installing).

After upgrading your TemplateVMs, please remember to switch all qubes
that were using the old template to use the new one (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/templates/#switching).

Please note that no user action is required regarding the OS version in
dom0. For details, please see our note on dom0 and EOL (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/supported-versions/#note-on-dom0-and-eol).

If you are a german speaker and want to discuss QubesOS in the german language then there is also an unofficial telegram group called „QubesOS Benutzer Deutschsprachig“ which has (as of today) ten members beside me: https://news.1rj.ru/str/QubesOS_user_de As of today the traffic volume is low.

Join our English support group here: https://news.1rj.ru/str/joinchat/B8FHpkEToMfgdREGV7wzRQ

Anyone is welcomed!

Note: please confirm Captcha so we know you are human. Thanks!

Xen Summit Keynote: Your self-driving car is awesome. . .because of open source software like Xen
https://xenproject.org/2020/10/30/xen-summit-keynote-your-self-driving-car-is-awesome-because-of-open-source-software-like-xen/

In this blog series, we will revisit talks from the recent Xen Project Developer and Design Summit, which took place virtually in the summer of 2020.  In his keynote speech,...

Qubes OS 4.0.4-rc1 has been released!
https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2020/11/05/qubes-4-0-4-rc1/

We’re pleased to announce the first release candidate for Qubes OS
4.0.4.

Qubes OS 4.0.4-rc1 includes many updates over the initial 4.0 release,
in particular:

All 4.0 dom0 updates to date
Fedora 32 TemplateVM
Debian 10 TemplateVM
Whonix 15 Gateway and Workstation TemplateVMs
Linux kernel 4.19 by default
Qubes 4.0.4-rc1 is available on the downloads (https://www.qubes-os.org/downloads/) page.

What is a point release?

A point release does not designate a separate, new version of Qubes OS.
Rather, it designates its respective major or minor release (in this
case, 4.0) inclusive of all updates up to a certain point. Installing
Qubes 4.0 and fully updating it results in the same system as installing
Qubes 4.0.4.

What should I do?

If you installed Qubes 4.0, 4.0.1, 4.0.2, or 4.0.3 and have fully
updated (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/updating-qubes-os/), then your system is already equivalent to a Qubes 4.0.4
installation. No further action is required.

Regardless of your current OS, if you wish to install (or reinstall)
Qubes 4.0 for any reason, then the 4.0.4 ISO makes this more convenient
and secure, since it bundles all Qubes 4.0 updates to date. Please see
the installation guide (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/installation-guide/) for detailed instructions.

If you’re willing to test (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/testing/) this release candidate, you can help to
improve the stable release by reporting any bugs you encounter (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/reporting-bugs/).

Release candidate planning

If no major issues are discovered in 4.0.4-rc1, we expect to announce
the stable release of 4.0.4 in a couple weeks.

Design Session – Xen FuSA SIG present and future
https://xenproject.org/2020/11/06/design-session-xen-fusa-sig-present-and-future/

In this Xen Summit Design Session, the Xen Functional Safety Special Interest Group (FuSA SIG), outlines the progress of the group around Xen and Certification, what is currently being done,...

QSB #061: Information leak via power sidechannel (XSA-351)
https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2020/11/10/qsb-061/

We have just published Qubes Security Bulletin (QSB) #061:
Information leak via power sidechannel (XSA-351).
The text of this QSB is reproduced below. This QSB and its accompanying
signatures will always be available in the Qubes Security Pack (qubes-secpack).

View QSB #061 in the qubes-secpack:

https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-secpack/blob/master/QSBs/qsb-061-2020.txt

Learn about the qubes-secpack, including how to obtain, verify, and read it:

https://www.qubes-os.org/security/pack/

View all past QSBs:

https://www.qubes-os.org/security/bulletins/

View XSA-351 in the XSA Tracker:

https://www.qubes-os.org/security/xsa/#351



---===[ Qubes Security Bulletin #61 ]===---

2020-11-10


Information leak via power sidechannel (XSA-351)


Summary
========

On 2020-11-10, the Xen Security Team published Xen Security Advisory
351 (XSA-351) [1] with the following denoscription:

| Researchers have demonstrated using software power/energy monitoring
| interfaces to create covert channels, and infer the operations/data used
| by other contexts within the system.
|
| Access to these interfaces should be restricted to privileged software,
| but it was found that Xen doesn't restrict access suitably, and the
| interfaces are accessible to all guests.
|
| For more information, see:
| https://platypusattack.com
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security-center/advisory/intel-sa-00389.html
|
| An unprivileged guest administrator can sample platform power/energy
| data. This may be used to infer the operations/data used by other
| contexts within the system.
|
| The research demonstrates using this sidechannel to leak the AES keys
| used elsewhere in the system.


Patching
=========

The specific packages that resolve the problems discussed in this
bulletin are as follows:

For Qubes 4.0:
- Xen packages, version 4.8.5-26
For Qubes 4.1:
- Xen packages, version 4.14.0-7

The packages are to be installed in dom0 via the Qube Manager or via
the qubes-dom0-update command as follows:

For updates from the stable repository (not immediately available):
$ sudo qubes-dom0-update

For updates from the security-testing repository:
$ sudo qubes-dom0-update --enablerepo=qubes-dom0-security-testing

A system restart will be required afterwards.

These packages will migrate from the security-testing repository to the
current (stable) repository over the next two weeks after being tested
by the community.

If you use Anti Evil Maid, you will need to reseal your secret
passphrase to new PCR values, as PCR18+19 will change due to the new
Xen binaries.


Credits
========

See the original Xen Security Advisory.


References
===========

[1] https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-351.html

--
The Qubes Security Team
https://www.qubes-os.org/security/

QSB #062: Stack corruption from XSA-346 change (XSA-355)
https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2020/11/24/qsb-062/

We have just published Qubes Security Bulletin (QSB) #062:
Stack corruption from XSA-346 change (XSA-355).
The text of this QSB is reproduced below. This QSB and its accompanying
signatures will always be available in the Qubes Security Pack (qubes-secpack).

View QSB #062 in the qubes-secpack:

https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-secpack/blob/master/QSBs/qsb-062-2020.txt

Learn about the qubes-secpack, including how to obtain, verify, and read it:

https://www.qubes-os.org/security/pack/

View all past QSBs:

https://www.qubes-os.org/security/bulletins/

View XSA-355 in the XSA Tracker:

https://www.qubes-os.org/security/xsa/#355



---===[ Qubes Security Bulletin #62 ]===---

2020-11-24


Stack corruption from XSA-346 change (XSA-355)


Summary
========

On 2020-11-24, the Xen Security Team published Xen Security Advisory
355 (XSA-355) [1] with the following denoscription:

| One of the two changes for XSA-346 introduced an on-stack array. The
| check for guarding against overrunning this array was off by one,
| allowing for corruption of the first stack slot immediately following
| this array.
|
| A malicious or buggy HVM or PVH guest can cause Xen to crash, resulting
| in a Denial of Service (DoS) to the entire host. Privilege escalation
| as well as information leaks cannot be excluded.


Patching
=========

The specific packages that resolve the problems discussed in this
bulletin are as follows:

For Qubes 4.0:
- Xen packages, version 4.8.5-27
For Qubes 4.1:
- Xen packages, version 4.14.0-8

The packages are to be installed in dom0 via the Qube Manager or via
the qubes-dom0-update command as follows:

For updates from the stable repository (not immediately available):
$ sudo qubes-dom0-update

For updates from the security-testing repository:
$ sudo qubes-dom0-update --enablerepo=qubes-dom0-security-testing

A system restart will be required afterwards.

These packages will migrate from the security-testing repository to the
current (stable) repository over the next two weeks after being tested
by the community.

If you use Anti Evil Maid, you will need to reseal your secret
passphrase to new PCR values, as PCR18+19 will change due to the new
Xen binaries.


Credits
========

See the original Xen Security Advisory.


References
===========

[1] https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/advisory-355.html

--
The Qubes Security Team
https://www.qubes-os.org/security/

Qubes Survey: The Results
https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2020/11/26/qubes-survey-results/

Hello, lovely Qubes Community!

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to participate in a survey; to our delight and surprise, over 2100 of you decided to help us and filled it out!
We are grateful for our wonderful community and wanted to share some interesting findings from the survey with you.
A small statistical note: a survey such as this, on a non-random and very much self-selected sample, is not necessarily completely representative of the whole community.
It’s quite possible that the people whom we did not reach and the people who decided not the participate in the survey differ in statistical ways from those we did survey, so please understand all of the “community members say X” statements below as having a little asterisk with “as far as we know based on this survey”.

Some introductory stats: 54% percent of our respondents have Qubes installed, and 22% are planning to.

Most of them are expert computer users to varying degrees, but 1% said that they prefer not to use computers when they don’t have to.
Seeing the state of security in the wide computer world, sometimes we’re tempted to agree.

It also turned out that our community has a fairly unsurprising age spread, with almost half (43%) of the respondents between 18 and 34 and a third (31%) between 35 and 49.
There are people over 70 and under 18 among us, too.

About one-third of the respondents are developers (which is in line with what we anticipated — after all, Qubes is a pretty technical piece of software), and IT professionals of all sorts are about sixty percent of the respondents.
We also have a strong contingent of academics (19%) and activists (16%).

For privacy reasons, we won’t be sharing a detailed breakdown of where our users are located, but we made a map with countries colored based on how many Qubes users are there, for your and our enjoyment.
Note: the map is based on Wikipedia’s map of the world. Please forgive any inaccuracies in it.

While doing the data crunching, I was a bit fascinated by three large groups of people: those from capital cities just putting down the name of the capital (omitting the country name), people in the US replying with just the name of their town (I’ve learned a lot about small American towns!) and people in the UK clarifying they are not English, thank you very much.
I had to smile at “United Kingdom of England and Some Actually Good Countries”.

We’re very interested in the hardware people are using and want to use with Qubes. Hardware is always a difficult subject for us, as there’s a lot of possible combinations and not nearly enough manpower to test and fix bugs for all of them, and we want to know where to focus our resources.
This intuition was well confirmed by the survey: hardware compatibility was something a lot of people mentioned in the “reasons for not using Qubes/reasons for stopping using Qubes” questions.

Following the common trend in modern hardware, most people use laptops or laptops and desktops equally (only 22% of our respondents use mostly a desktop computer), and most Qubes users tend to use it on a laptop (63% of them in the survey).
A lot of people use external monitors with their laptops (over 55% of laptop users), and we know an external monitor can be tricky to use with Qubes, leading to all sorts of annoying problems with layout or input detection. (If you haven’t yet tried it, take a look here: Qubes GUI Troubleshooting (https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/gui-troubleshooting/)).
A significant number of respondents also say they use cameras (36%) and microphones (60%). It makes me wonder what the responses to this question would be a year ago, before so many of us started working remotely.

As far as desired Qubes localization goes, there were few surprises, with the overwhelming majority preferring English (for a survey in English, it’s hard to be shocked by this result), and the next places being taken by German (over 200 votes), French (over 120 votes), Spanish (over 80) and Russian (over 70).
One impressive polyglot said they use a different language in each AppVM to easily distinguish their working environments, and I have to say, I wish I spoke enough languages to achieve that!

We asked about the OS our respondents find most comfortable, and, clearly, most prefer using Linux (48%), with Windows and Qubes (about 21% each) close seconds.
Finally, there’s little love for Mac OS, with less than 10% of respondents listing it as “most comfortable”.
Among Linux users, the range of distributions wasn’t very surprising, with Debian and Ubuntu as clear leaders, with over 50% selecting each as the distribution they use.

We also asked about the distribution you would prefer as the default template for AppVMs.
Debian got over twice as many votes (686) as the runner-up, Fedora (336).
Sounds like a good moment to mention that in Qubes 4.1 you can choose the default template at install (currently between Fedora and Debian).
Arch Linux (third place, with 74 people writing it in as ‘Other’) is also available as a community template and is well-maintained.
Interestingly enough, just using a distribution doesn’t mean someone wants to use it as the default template in Qubes, with some distributions having much more ardent supporters.
82% of people who use Debian want it as the default template, which is not that surprising, as Debian was one of the options explicitly offered in the “default distro” question.
But also almost 50% of NixOS users want it as the default template, which even from a purely methodological point of view is a lot, as they had to explicitly write this distribution down in the second question.
NixOS has some very devoted users!
On the other hand, although Ubuntu was one of the most popular distributions, only 4% of its users wrote it as their preferred default distribution…

Distribution
Users
Want it as default template
Debian
1103
82%
Ubuntu

928
4%
Fedora
783
55%
Arch Linux
438
23%
CentOS
265
6%
Gentoo
86
34%
NixOS
46
46%
(This table contains only the most popular choices, not all answers.)

From a UX development point of view, a particularly important question for us was “How many qubes do you typically run at the same time?”
Turns out that about the same number of people run 3-5 qubes as 6-10 (about 38%).
This will definitely be a huge help in future development of the various Qubes tools and widgets. It’s also a bit more than we suspected before!