Mousepointer out-of-sync in HVM(s)

[ckN6QwSZ]

At the moment I’m transferring a few vulnerable VMs from Virtualbox to Qubes OS as HVMs.

To run them as HVMs is a necessity since there are vulnerable kernels to exploit, vulnerable stuff is located outside of /home/, rebuilding the boxes as PVH likely is cumbersome and prone to miss stuff. I’m going to document how I resize the boxes to 10G in another post.

Anyway, I got a HVM in which the mouse pointer is out-of-sync by factor two or three I believe. Googled the issue, found some workarounds like “resize the display twice and it’ll work”, “change settings in virtualbox”, “change settings in VM” but those approaches haven’t fixed the issue for me.

Does anyone have experience with this? A more systematic approach?

[alzer89]

@ckN6QwSZ, just checking. Are you wanting these VMs to be vulnerable, presumably for exploit testing?

[ckN6QwSZ]

Yes, that are CTF machines like “Metasploitable 2”, “Juice Shop”, “DVWA” and so forth.

[alzer89]

@ckN6QwSZ

Yes, that are CTF machines like “Metasploitable 2”, “Juice Shop”, “DVWA” and so forth.

Very nice

@ckN6QwSZ

rebuilding the boxes as PVH likely is cumbersome and prone to miss stuff.

On a sidenote, converting HVMs to PVHs might actually be worth exploring at some point in time. It would be interesting if you found anything

@ckN6QwSZ

I’m going to document how I resize the boxes to 10G in another post.

Yes, please. That would definitely be extremely useful to quite a few users, both new to Qubes OS and veteran users. And it can then be turned into a guided tutorial soon after that.

@ckN6QwSZ

I got a HVM in which the mouse pointer is out-of-sync by factor two or three I believe.

I could be wrong (and quite happy for anyone to correct me on this), but could it have anything to do with Wayland? I have encountered weird things when HVMs had Wayland as the display manager, but a lot of them were fixed a while ago…

@ckN6QwSZ

Does anyone have experience with this?

Sadly not as much experience as I wish I had. I’ve had multiple HVMs open on Qubes OS with port forwarding rules set up for network design and simulation, but never for CTF…

In any case, I’ve had slight cursor delays in Windows HVMs, but never to the extent that you’re describing, unfortunately…

What you’re trying to do is literally one of the selling points of Qubes OS that doesn’t get talked about enough, and I wish it was publicised more…

Sorry I couldn’t be of more help, but I guarantee you that someone here will be able to help

[ckN6QwSZ]

@alzer89

On a sidenote, converting HVMs to PVHs might actually be worth exploring at some point in time.

That would just be copying files from /home/ (vulnerable machine) to /home/ (appVM). Or from / (vulnerable machine) to / (templateVM). Cumbersome and if the way to root relies on i.e. Dirty COW (Dirty COW - Wikipedia) you are stuck with a 5.15.x-y.fc32-qubes.x86_64-kernel.

@alzer89

@ckN6QwSZ

I’m going to document how I resize the boxes to 10G in another post.

Yes, please. That would definitely be extremely useful to quite a few users

That’s just a quick and dirty writeup:

How-to resize volume images and import them as HVMs

As mentioned in another thread I would like to provide a short how-to for resizing images of vulnerable VMs which then can be used in Qubes as HVMs. In your non-Qubes host system: download the current build of gparted-live (https://gparted.org/download.php) in virtualbox attach the gparted-live.iso as CD to your VM and boot into gparted-live on that VM resize the VM’s root partition to 6GB, 8GB or what seems feasable, most vulnerable machines should be smaller than 10GB shutdown VM and make i…

@alzer89

What you’re trying to do is literally one of the selling points of Qubes OS that doesn’t get talked about enough, and I wish it was publicised more…

HVMs are like VMs to other host-systems and for my part they deserve attention, too.

Before we further clutter the forumthread, we can continue to chit-chat via forum direct messaging.