From the material I am working on, I have now created a rather short paper describing the risks of using today’s IT. While it does not explicitly mention Qubes OS, it just lists those problems that Qubes can help to mitigate, like hardly any other current system.
The paper is structured as follows:
1 Introduction and objectives
2 Analysis of technical risks
3 Analysis of organizational risks
4 Analysis of governmental and legal risks
5 Analysis of commercial risks
6 Special category: Risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI)
7 Summary, analysis, and conclusion
While showing the risks of using today’s inadequate systems is necessary and helpful, it does not help you very much to get out of this situation. Therefore, I have now created an additional, more technical paper detailing a concrete way to proceed towards a more satisfying environment. This paper clearly shows the advantages of using Qubes OS and describes steps to successfully implement and use it.
The paper is structured as follows:
1 The need for a new security architecture
2 Analysis of the core vulnerability:
3 The paradigm shift:
4 A holistic strategy for digital sovereignty
5 Organizational implications and recommendations for action
6 Conclusion: Proactively securing the digital future
Finally, I created one more paper intended to show it to IT managers.
The paper is structured as follows:
1 The strategic necessity of reassessing IT security
2 Analysis of the current risk landscape: Dependencies and threats
3 The strategic approach: Technical measures for greater resilience
4 Implementation: Organizational and economic decisions
5 Conclusion and recommendations for action
Putting it all together, I have now created a paper containing the material from the earlier papers, adding a lot of explanations. This nearly doubled the size of the original paper, but could now be used to brief IT management - and possibly nudge them to consider at least testing how Qubes OS could help from out of the common vendor-lock-in.
Here’s a short summary of the new paper:
The text provides a comprehensive analysis of IT security
and digital sovereignty by first raising awareness of the manifold
risks of IT use, ranging from curiosity about malicious links to
concerns about telemetry data and AI manipulation. It identifies
vulnerabilities and threats posed by actors such as hackers,
government agencies (such as the 14 Eyes), and commercial
data giants, highlighting technical deficiencies and the monolithic
architecture of many systems as root causes. As solutions, the
text proposes a series of measures to improve technical protection,
including the use of open source systems (such as Linux derivatives), virtualization (e.g., Qubes OS), modern file systems, and anonymizing
Internet access. Finally, it emphasizes the organizational and
economic changes needed to move away from the insecure status quo,
such as long-term funding for open source projects and a greater
willingness to change among decision-makers.
