Month: April 2018

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KeePassXC on Qubes

Until 1Password takes the Linux community seriously, KeepassXC is the preferred choice for me.

1Password offer a cloud based solution with only chrome-integration, almost like KeePassXC has for Firefox, Chrome, Vivaldi and Chromium, but Chrome wont be my preferred choice just yet. And also since Cloud solutions has a broader attack vector, there is no need to put the crown jewels on display, when sensitive hacks are almost happening daily on the internet.

If I get a trojan on my active computer, or buy a chinese keyboard, AND have my password database in the cloud, they can login and download it and harvest all my precious passwords without effort and without any fancy cracking efforts. Therefore if you enjoy cloud services, you might consider to use MFA to access the cloud (and hope your 2nd factor device is not pwned too 😉 Remember that SMS might be in clear text through airwaves that anybody might listen to or abuse in other ways.

Keeping an offline password manager is what I feel comfortable with, so that is what my current needs are.

And here, KeePassXC seems to be the best multiplatform solution around. And an important thing to remember is that if you have an offline password manager(or password manager installed in an “air-gapped” VM in Qubes, the risks of breaches are smaller even with bugs in the Password Manager software, since nothing directly enters a VM without network connection. So you need bugs in the underlying OS to get breached. Not impossible, but more rare in hypervisors with an offline vault than a traditional OS without.

Air-gapped VMs are also used as Split-GPG and Bitcoin wallets, so I guess its a bit more secure. Enhance your setup with a copy of your database on a PIN-enabled secure USB and sync it to your vault VM regularly.

P.S. Yubikey supports KeePassXC, but not as traditional 2FA

In Fedora 27 and later a newer and better version of KeePassXC is available. Remember to enable recommended security settings:

sudo yum install keepassxc

– Database settings – encryption – Argon2.

– General – Basic settings – Automatically save after every change.

– lock the database after use (time, immediately, etc)

If you use Qubes, you can have the password manager in the “vault” VM and ctrl-c, ctrl-shift-c in the vaultVM and ctrl-shift-v and ctrl-v in the destination VM to feel safer. You can also have a secure password file in vault and a less secure in another vm with internet access.

If safety is not the biggest issue for you and you use multiple computers, then install firefox addon, dropbox and sync selectively :

In Firefox addon:

yum install dropbox.rpm (otherwise dependencies are left out)

Point your KeePassXC to the synced folder .kdbx file.

Enable 2factor authentication to dropbox to prevent ease of access for bad people.

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Configuring Cisco ASA VPN on Qubes 4.0 with openconnect

I have rewritten my VPN guide for Qubes 4.0, since my old post from 3.2, didn’t work out of the box and solutions on the web, didn’t sit well with me. I chose to investigate how I can make a guide like the last one, just for Qubes 4.0.

Here it is, although the changes are few:

Create your vpn appVM, based on your preferred fedora template:

Add the ‘network-manager’  as a service :

Tur on the AppVM, and when the network icon appears, add the vpn connection:

Select the OpenConnect type:

Insert FQDN in the gateway section and save.

Start the VPN connection:

Type yur password and the connection will be established and your icon look like this:

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Cloning fedora-26 to fedora-27 template Qubes 3.2

UPDATE: Qubes officially have support for Fedora-27 now:

and fedora-28

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I suddenly got a message that there are new updates to fedora-26 and those updates was the release of a fedora-27.

Sadly, there is no qubes fedora-27 template :

so I think we will have to follow the guide used in fedora-25 -> fedora-26 and see if we can use that for fedora-26 -> fedora-27 (and probably 28 also…):

clone the VM

prepare the new template and start gnome-terminal to configure the new release and run updates

See the error, showing there’s missing fc27 repository in qubes 3.2.

disable all qubes repositories and update to fedora 27 in the TemplateVM and select 26 hoping the differences are not too many ( list here).

I think it’s better to use the fedora-26 qubes repo, from Qubes 3.2 on fedora-27, than  trying the Qubes 4.0 fc27 repo, but I have no actual knowledge backing it up. Funny that Qubes 4.0 has a fc28, when it hasn’t been released properly yet. That is amazing 🙂 Great work, Qubes-team. (I couldn’t get it to work on 4.0, though)

Change fc$releasever in the repo-file to fc26, before the dnf update, and run it:

After applying updates, shut down the VM and clean up the files in dom0:

And voilá. The TemplateVM is ready to go, without any warranties, but it seems with KeePassXC 2.3.1 instead of 2.2.4, as an example (Better browser integration :).

And with Fedora 28 in beta, it might be a good idea to do the above again, just with fedora 28 and qubes fedora 26 repository.