Using Bookmarks with Disposable Qubes

Is there any way to securely storing bookmarks from many VM to single VM, which is offline. And after that receiving them like split-gpg. As most of my VM are dispvm and in that scenerio, I want to bookmark some pages in browser now and then, but obviously they disappears after shutting down VM. I don’t have a way so that those bookmarks goes to a persistent VM by default and can be bring up into dispvm when needed next time.I would like to enforce here that those many VM are used for different identities, would it be safe to store them in single VM if any solution exist for same in Qubes already, which I don’t know yet.

Hi,
you could export the bookmarks manually of firefox (or chromium), here is a guide for firefox:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/export-firefox-bookmarks-to-backup-or-transfer

And then copy the file from the vm to another one using this guide:

But all of that is a lot of work honestly. The easiest way I see would be to just copy past the urls as you go using this:


The draw back now is that it will be harder to import those links as bookmark.

I don’t how you built your security/privacy model but wouldn’t it be easier to just keep each qubes as your different identities instead of having multiple dispVM ? I don’t see why you would like to mix afterwards your activity, that would kind of break the point of having multiple qubes ?

KileXt

I see three ways to share bookmarks, in firefox, but each has some quirks depending on how you work or your comfort zone with security.

  1. copy and paste each bookmark individually.

  2. export bookmarks and then copy-to-other-vm. Open the file in the other vm, click/open the links you want, bookmark it again in the new browser. Alturatively you could import the file, but you may stand a chance to lose any other existing bookmarks. Ymmv.

  3. Use Firefox’s built in bookmark sync. Just create a ff account and turn off sync for everything but the bookmark sharing, sync once external to the DVM. When opening the DVM login to ff, sync, bookmark your sites, sync again before exiting. When you open any other appvm the bookmarks will appear after ff syncs there.

This may be what you’re looking for (I haven’t looked too deep on it though – so I’m not sure it exactly matches your question)

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One way is to export the bookmarks into individual InternetShortcut files, then put them all in one VM.

For example, file “google.url” containing:

[InternetShortcut]
URL=https://www.google.com
VM=personal

These have MIME type application/x-mswinurl

You can then assign this MIME type to an “opener” bash script that extracts the URL and VM and passes them to qvm-open-in-vm

Double-clicking this internet shortcut will then automatically route it to the appropriate VM. As a result, your file manager doubles as a bookmark manager. The filenames of your bookmarks can be indexed by kupfer, gnome-do, etc… for instant access to your entire bookmark collection.

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One quick note on your setup: if your objective with having so many dispVMs is anonymity/privacy, the you should be aware (or maybe already are) that DispVMs on its own don’t give you more of that. Read more on the FAQ: What about privacy in non-Whonix qubes?

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Is there any chance of integrating this in Official Qubes in future? I tried it and it’s good. But I am not an code reviewer so cannot verify it for security, so can it be malicious…

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Also, @wobo can I restate your issue as “Using Bookmarks with Disposable Qubes”? (meaning, changing the title)

I know that DispVM don’t offer anonymity, but they can offer security (I guess). Identies are managed with help of VPN and plain internet for different dispvm here in my case.

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yes, that’s better title I think.

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:+1:

Glad you know. But I think it’s better to ask just in case. (and in case others see the thread and get the wrong impression about Disposable Qubes)

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Indeed, there is already an open issue for it:

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