Hello
do sim cards work for internet on qubes os? also is it safe practice to use burner sim cards? what i want to know is can somehow some leak happen using the sim card with it’s provider about my activities or hardware it self?, beside using a vpn or whonix
The good wording for th question is “are there LTE modems compatible with Qubes OS?”, some laptops have built-in modems where you put the card in it, but IMO the simplest setup would be to use an external device offering the network through an ethernet connection or wireless hotspot
safe against what?
If it’s an internal modem, it’s certainly a proprietary black box that “does things”, you can’t be sure what it’s sharing with the ISP, maybe it has some internal ID that could allows “someone” to know which laptop received this ID. About the “activities”, the modem should only be aware of what’s going through, so I wouldn’t worry about it.
Using a dedicated device seems more reasonable to me for multiple reasons, like easier setup and air gapped black box 
if that is the case, then it’s not safe i assume, technically it’s like using an intel CPU or AMD… they are both closed source, basically i want to use burner sims when ever i need without leaking information about the hardware the sim is inserted to, i guess the safer option here is using a burner phone, or an external device as a hotspot without the card physically inserted into the laptop
@solene
not really because the CPU would only leak information through wifi or ethernet, it’s easy to monitor using cheap gears
Trusting a LTE modem is harder because you can’t easily monitor what it’s sending over the air.
You need to define a threat model to know what you need to protect against.
journaling, i don’t want to get a burner phone involved but it seems like it’s either that or a hardware to share hotspot
another thing i figured is that in theory if sim card is inserted, aside anything else, the ISP would know that you are using qubes os if the dom0 update qube is routed through sys net and not whonix, since it’ll leak the qubes os update servers to the sim card traffic capture
what is “cheap gear”?
now, you could route everything through a different netvm, like sys-whonix or a VPN
connect your computer using ethernet, to another computer with 2 ethernet devices configured as a transparent proxy, and do some packet inspection. A very old laptop + a usb ethernet card cost very little
why not using a VPN and tor?