Hello,
Especially with X11, because the Wayland version of KDE on Qubes OS has too many bugs.
Does using KDE X11 increase attack surface?
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On the one hand, bugs in dom0 are not dangerous, because you don’t run untrusted software there, which would exploit them.
On the other hand, there is a long discussion here about importance of minimizing dom0 and its implications for the security.
I would say that the attack surface increases very little, which should only concern you if you defend against serious attackers with huge resources.
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Last time I checked, KDE was the DE with the highest number of Lines of Code. It has around 19 million lines of code while Gnome around 18 Millions. Cinnamon under a million and LXQt around half a million. Something like dwm around 2.5 thousand. XFCE has also far less than KDE. I would say something much more complex is not good for security.
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Depends on your threat model.
Wayland isn’t supported, yet.
Probably.
Just be very cautious to install anything else, like themes, widgets etc.
And follow the official installation process, of course: KDE (desktop environment) | Qubes OS
I personally use KDE.
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Would it be possible to get an up-to-date, informed statement on this topic?
I was only able to find this 2016 issue by Rutkowska which implicitly rules out any security impact of using KDE in dom0 as opposed to using XFCE (implicit because she surely would have mentioned any security impact if there was one).
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Why do you expect that something has changed here? Any malicious software in dom0 is a game over; any buggy software shouldn’t make a big difference, since there’s nobody to exploit the bugs (except you yourself).
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Sure, here is an always-relevant statement regardless of context:
I contacted a consulting service to get a high-assurance answer to this topic’s question.
It is relevant to me as I would like to develop a KDE app for Dom0 to give users a native look and access to easy theming not only on KDE. I will refrain from doing so if installing KDE packages increases the attack surface.
Since 2016, sys-gui was introduced and in general, 8.5 years of development are a long time. If you instead are referring to the date of the last post in this topic (1 year ago), I would like to emphasize that I have a strong need for certainty regarding this question and that the current replies do not fulfill that need.
@FranklyFlawless KDE is open-source software and does not need to be trusted. The statement you quoted refers to hardware, which (unless you have access to a non-destructive hardware verification method) always has to be trusted.
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The statement I provided is generic and can be applied to trust as a fundamental security concept, which does not require contacting any consulting service to prove its validity.
It wasn’t introduced by default yet. AFAIK it’s not very stable at the moment.
unman from the Qubes team still thinks that KDE is a great way to use Qubes OS:
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