How do I make the qubes in Qubes OS look like real hardware or a different virtualizer?

How do I make the qubes in Qubes OS look like real hardware or a different virtualizer, because certain applications flag that I’m running Qubes OS?

There is not known way. How to hide the fact that I'm Qubes OS from Telegram

2 Likes

Would using a standalone solve this?

1 Like

Hiding that you run Qubes OS might be a thing, - you could just start a VM without all the Qubes OS fancyness tools inside it, like stupid example with an .iso:

qvm-create --class StandaloneVM --label red --property virt_mode=hvm debian-iso
qvm-prefs debian-iso kernel ''"
qvm-volume resize debian-iso:root 30G
qvm-start debian-iso --cdrom=/home/user/debian.iso

I’m not 100% sure, but from what I understand this linux would know “I am running in xen”, not “I am running in Qubes OS”.

For regular Qubes VMs created from Qubes OS or community templates, the presence of all the Qubes tools and alike is a dead giveaway for “runs on Qubes OS”.

So if your goal is to make it look like “runs on some XEN” - that you can do. If your goal is to look like “Runs on VMware or KVM or whatever” - thats a bit hard.
Although you could maybe convince some virtualizer to run inside a XEN VM - I’m sure it would kill your performance, but maybe you don’t care about that much.

Only Flatpak and Distrobox will help hide the use of Qubes OS

I tried kicksecure.iso

Device: Telegram Desktop, 6.9.3, HVM domU, Linux LXQt labwc wlroots Wayland glibc 2.41

1 Like

What became of this qubes cloud idea…? I often thought it would be lovely to just see the screen of some VM far away in a datacenter…
There are things (like telegram and whatsapp, and many others) that I just don’t want on my box x)

Found it: Qubes Air: Generalizing the Qubes Architecture | Qubes OS I think this wasn’t much followed up on :frowning:

Or maybe it was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5IqLeLBUXQ

There are things that I’d love to have on my box like a working phone (android) VM, specifically for stuff like a banking app, but most banking apps REALLY don’t like that idea…
Renting a phone in a datacenter is the last resort here it seems.

This has been tested many times already - Flatpak works best, so telegram and other apps will simply see ‘flatpak’. In Distrobox, apps will see a podman/docker container. By the way, I don’t recommend using telegram: Send Telegram Messages over Tor with Whonix ™