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QubesOS
qubes-secpack
Python2015–2024
QubesOS / qubes-secpack

qubes-secpack

Qubes Security Pack

Security & Privacy
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
7Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
559GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Qubes Security Pack

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-10-29 14:02:40 UTC to 2024-04-06 17:07:02 UTC.

0122015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

9 sources
fsflover·Jul 26, 2021
1. It prevents DMA attacks allowing PCI devices to read, write the memory. https://www.qubes-os.org/faq/#why-is-vt-dadm-viamd-iommu-imp... 2. Meltdown, the most reliable attack of the three discussed, cannot be exploited _from_ a fully-virtualized (i.e. HVM or PVH) VM. https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-secpack/blob/master/QSBs/qs... 3. It serves as an additional virtualization layer on top of Xen supervisor, decreasing the attack surface and making some serious bugs not harmful. https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2017/07/31/qubes-40-rc1/#fully...
In When will we get secure desktop OSes? (2018)
walterbell·Oct 29, 2015
| The code to validate level 2 page table entries is bypassed when | certain conditions are satisfied. This means that a PV guest can | create writeable mappings using super page mappings. | | Such writeable mappings can violate Xen intended invariants for pages | which Xen is supposed to keep read-only. Xen is used by security-focused Qubes, which published an analysis of XSA-148, https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-secpack/blob/master/QSBs/qs...: "The above is a political way of stating the bug is a very critical one. Probably the worst we have seen affecting the Xen hypervisor, ever. Sadly. Admittedly this is subtle bug, because there is no buggy code that could be spotted immediately ... On the other hand, it is really shocking that such a bug has been lurking in the core of the hypervisor for so many years. In our opinion t
Read the rest
he Xen project should rethink their coding guidelines and try to come up with practices and perhaps additional mechanisms that would not let similar flaws to plague the hypervisor ever again (assert-like mechanisms perhaps?). Otherwise the whole project makes no sense, at least to those who would like to use Xen for security-sensitive work. Specifically, it worries us that, in the last 7 years (i.e. all the time when the bug was sitting there having a good time) so much engineering and development effort has been put into adding all sorts of new features and whatnots, yet no serious effort to improve Xen security effectively. Because there have been, of course, many more security bugs found in Xen over the last years (as the numbering of this XSA suggests)... the bugs in Xen are being found regularly, and this is no good news. For a type-1 hypervisor of the age and maturity of Xen, this simply should not be happening. If it does, it suggests the development process is not prioritizing security."
In Critical Xen bug in PV memory virtualization code

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