Hold on to your Pi(s)... Qubes may have a use for them

I believe many of us are in the same situation: having a raspberry pi just gathering dust on the shelf. For those who haven’t been paying attention, the current development direction (Qubes Air) may take us to a oasis of raspberry pi usefulness:

Read more on the original blog post about this update

This is just really a post to catch anyone who had not seen this yet and may identify themselves with this wasted computing situation…

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So If I’m understanding this correctly, the idea is to use each separate computing device as a single VM host and chain them together into a system, potentially allowing every RPi to host one or more fragments of the system in a physical package.

For example, I’ve often wondered whether sys-net is the most vulnerable given its an HVM that handles PCI devices and is connected to the internet without any filtration (internally). The biggest threat is sys-net being used as a bridgehead to punch through Xen, which leads to GameOver™. Moving sys-net onto a physically separated RPi adds another layer of insulation, but is not a magic bullet as that RPi will have to connect to the Qubes PC via NIC or USB, which entails a receiving HVM PCI qube, so an attacker with the ability to compromise the RPi can simply just repeat that step.

Maybe sticking a firewall (another RPi or smaller device running Mirage would be ideal IMO) between the sys-net RPi and the Qubes OS machine would provide enough insulation, but then again I’m not really knowledgeable about technical matters and am just thinking out loud.

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