VM and privacy

Hi, can anyone help me with this question: can using a VM with TAILS get around hardware backdoors?

An obfuscation layer can break things but it cant be secure, for example if it just takes screenshots on a side channel whats a vm gonna do? The type of firmware malware on drives/sticks that copies files that trigger their filter to a secret sector might break though considering vm's use a single file as the drive.

What backdoors exactly? VM is just a way to run another OS on top of existing one, it doesn't automatically grant you any security or privacy since there are millions of lines of code in it and they constantly get 0days and exploits. In fact, many performance-increasing things like GPU passthrough decrease security since they allow more direct interaction with hardware. Running Tails in virtual machine makes no sense because it's supposed to run on bare metal to be amnesic, a regular OS underneath keeps logs, takes screenshots and records keystrokes and whatever if you're an idiot. If you need the internals of virtual machine to be more secure from software network leaks of software you run within, Whonix exists, it contains two separate virtual machines that act as a virtual workstation and virtual router, you can do this with physical hardware more reliably. Qubes OS exists for managing Whonix virtual machines, as well as every other user-facing program in their own virtual machines to supposedly make it more secure from software leaks, but again, all trust relies on millions lines of code VM implementation, and author of Qubes OS wrote such VM exploits before transitioning.

>>12797 >Running Tails in virtual machine makes no sense because it's supposed to run on bare metal to be amnesic, a regular OS underneath keeps logs, takes screenshots and records keystrokes and whatever if you're an idiot. The main issue is that Tails in a VM has no way to prevent the host OS from caching the VM memory to disk, either as normal swap activity or VM snapshots. And as you say, the whole point of Tails is to run in memory so there is no evidence left behind. >Qubes Has "driver domains" to protect against malicious hardware and firmware in theory. But it depends on another piece of hardware called an iommu. So it really just depends on where the hardware backdoor is. >author of Qubes OS wrote such VM exploits before transitioning. He did mostly windows rootkits before trooning out. And it's not like he wrote any significant portion of Xen itself. Qubes is mostly just a collection of scripts for managing VMs and making them "easy to use".

There's no way of getting around a hardware backdoor, other than not using the hardware. On the other hand, the presence of hardware backdoors in the equipment you buy off of Best Buy or something is pretty much impossible, even with chinese phones you buy off Aliexpress, they're checked by customs to make sure they don't contain anything suspicious.

>>12800 Dumbest soykaf i ever read here. Literally just google and you find cases of hardware malware from china. Its impossible to screen a chip for backdoors. And why just care about china? Cisco routers got malware implanted by feds at customs and its not just feds who can use these backdoors. Third parties can hijack that soykaf.

>>12800 > even with chinese phones you buy off Aliexpress, they're checked by customs to make sure they don't contain anything suspicious. You glow. Some lainon purchased a router with custom firmware pre-installed from the official shop and the box got tampered by the customs so a lainon just threw it away. Multiple cases, imageboards, reddit, etc. I'd say >>12804 too but it's there already. Multiple cases of tampered phones come from shady/small Aliexpress/etc sellers who sell phones in the cheap (beware of ebay cheap thinkpads, beware of interdiction). Considering it is China, the place where there's a huge population of hackers, it's not a surprise. The phones had been forcefully tampered, thus the PIT(partition) is not identical to either Chinese or Global versions of the phone, and is incompatible to custom android ROM and recovery, most of these would brick when installed (check XDA forums). I've even personally seen a phone with a literal backdoor preinstalled that has like 7GB appdata from all the data collection it does while also churning up most of the data plan, while having SU with a skull icon preinstalled, auto-installing apps, filled with tons of adware that it's not even funny, the adware was on every app that had been patched by a worm (like even fuarrrking Newpipe got injected with advertisment canvas). Well the seller did pretty well for pre-rooting the phone and creating a su-compatible recovery when there's nothing available at the time. Must have been making a lot more money from the ad worm they wrote. The story how it happened? They simply just plug in a micro-USB device that instantly flashes the partitions. >>12804 Handing your phone over Airport personnel while body scanning isn't safe too.

>>12800 some of it you can flash

>>12804 >Cisco routers got malware implanted by feds at customs what a joke

>>12835 It was frontpage tech news when it came out, google ffs