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Comment by syockit | Hacker News Reader

I don't have experience with MacOS to comment, but at least in Windows it's pretty much the same: as soon as you get the user to click OK in the UAC prompt, everything is fair game after that. Is there even a model desktop OS we can look to as being secure? Chrome OS perhaps?

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I've been experimenting with Qubes and it's the only OS I'm aware of that adequately addresses this issue. It's not usable for non-technical users though without a lot of learning/training and it can be a bit tedious to use sometimes.

I have all my personal data in its own isolated VM (Qube). I do all my browsing in another VM, which has its own home folder and no access to my personal VM. All my sensitive stuff like banking is done in its own VM. Every proprietary application gets its own VM (mainly Teamviewer and VS Code).

So if I do happen to run some program that's malicious, it has effectively zero access to anything sensitive unless it's aware of Qubes and knows how to break out of the hypervisor (non-trivial).

How is this different than running FreeBSD with a jail per application?

Harder boundaries? From what I understand, a hypervisor is much harder to break out of than a FreeBSD jail and provides more isolation between the VMs.

In some ways, things are better there on Windows here, because of code signing - if something isn't code-signed, you get a more prominent warning. I often wish for something like this on Linux (and it would have to be easy to use - no compiling your own kernel with additional modules for example).

It's really not easy to get a code signing certificate fraudulently (or to steal someone else's), but of course, there are some issues with code signing: for example, certificates are relatively expensive, so very few OSS/free software projects sign binaries.

For Windows, there are the Win32 apps that you talk about, which aren't sandboxed.

And there are the modern applications from the Microsoft Store or self-distributed as msix/appx which are properly sandboxed.

Win32 applications can also be sandboxed, when packaged as MSIX.

Windows 10X original roadmap was to merge both sandbox models, and it is also part of Project Reunion goals.

People have praised Qubes OS for its security in the past but I've never tried it.

I have. It's very secure but too much towards security on the security Vs usability scale for my liking.

I use it for specific purposes like possibly hostile browsing environments but I'd never consider it for a mainstream system to work on.

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