Now in this lecture I want to show you how to use cubes to carry out two important tasks that you're
used to use on other operating systems.
And as I do this again the idea of the separation and the different domains and virtual machines will
become even clearer.
So right now I have an instance of a file manager in my personal domain and on the left here I have
an instance of the file manager in my work domain.
In my work virtual machine again as you can see it's in blue.
And it says work at the start.
So as I showed you in the previous lecture when we downloaded something in my personal virtual machine
here the image.
It doesn't exist in my downloads directory in here because like we said these are two separate virtual
machines using two separate file systems.
Therefore they're completely separate and they do not share anything.
Now what I want to show you is copy pasting.
So let's say I wanted to copy this file.
I can right click copy or you can do control see just like any other operating system.
And then because this is a picture we can go to my pictures in here and just do control V.
All right click paste and we will have the picture.
So this is perfectly fine.
It's perfectly normal.
But if I do this again.
So let's do right click copy and let's say I want to put it in my downloads in my work file system in
my work domain.
If I do right click in here you'll see that the paste is great out.
I cannot paste and if I do control v you'll see that nothing will happen.
And the reason for this is again it goes back to the whole idea of the separation of the different domains
which are completely separate virtual machines.
So you can think of them as if they are two different computers.
Therefore what we did right now it's as if you go to a computer you right click and a copy image and
then you go to a completely different computer to another laptop and then you're trying to piece that
image in that laptop.
Obviously that's not going to work because these are two separate computers.
They used two different storage devices.
Therefore the second computer is not even aware that you actually copied something now because these
two computers or two these two domains are running within cubes within one hypervisor.
We can't actually copy and paste between them.
It's just slightly different.
So if you want to copy something within the same virtual machine or within the same domain it's fine
you can right click and copy but if you wanted to copy between two different domains or virtual machines
you'll have to right click this and instead of clicking on copy we're going to click to copy to other
up the M clicking on this will show us a window that'll ask us which VM or which domain we want to copy
this file to.
Now we want to copy this to our work VM to our work domain.
So I'm going to type work and I'm going to click on.
OK.
Now you'll see that this will not appear in here.
But if we go to the home directory you'll see we have a new directory in here called cubes in common.
And this is where you will see all the files that you copy from other domains or other virtual machines.
So if we double click this you'll see we have a directory called personal if you copied stuff from another
domain.
For example if you copied it from the untrusted you'll have a directory called untrusted so inside the
personal directory you'll see we have the image that we wanted.
If we double click it you'll see that the image is fine.
This is the actual image.
It did not get corrupted and you can now right click it and copied and pasted to any where you want
within this operating system within the work domain so this is how to copy files within a domain or
between two different domains.
Now what about copying text.
So let's just type something simple.
I'm just going to click on the search in here just so that I have a text box that I can type in and
I'm just gonna type this is some text to copy now if you want to copy this text within the same operating
system again it's exactly the same as any other operating system you select all the text that you want
to copy.
You can do right click copy or control C from your keyboard and then if we remove this and then open
the search bar again and do control V.
This will paste it in here for me.
So identical behavior to any other operating system that you're used to.
Again the tricky part is trying to copy this text from one domain from one virtual machine to another
domain because this domain right here is a completely separate computer.
It doesn't even know that you copied this text.
So to get around this you'll have to first select the whole text.
You'll have to do control C or right click copy to copy it and then we're going to do control shift
see doing this will copy the text into the global clipboard.
So right now the text that I just copied is available for all operating systems for all domains to capture.
And if you go here to our clipboard you can see that we have 25 bytes of data are copied from the personal
domain.
Now if we want to piece this in here in my work domain before we can do control V which is the shortcut
for pasting you have to first of all get the global clipboard get the text that we copied to the global
clipboard to do that you have to do controls shift v first and as you can see and I was telling us that
the global clipboard has been wiped and it's in my work domain clipboard now.
So now I can paste it exactly the same way that I paste anything else I can just do control V.
And as you can see we have the text pasted in here.
So this should show you how separated these virtual machines are.
And this is what make cubes so cool because they are so separated but they can also communicate with
each other.
If the user wants to but if a hacker gained access to one of these machines he doesn't have access to
the global domain and therefore they can't move from one domain to the other.
So if one machine gets hacked it's very difficult for a hacker to go and compromised the other machines.
Now another task that you will probably be performing a lot is connecting a USB device to your computer
whether it's a mouse a camera or a storage device.
When you connect to us be device to cubes it doesn't get connected to any domain or to any virtual machine
which is great because it is very hard to trust us devices.
I actually cover this in my conference in Orlando.
You can weaponize pretty much any US device even a USB B lamp or a mouse to execute commands on the
computer that it gets connected to.
And this way it'll allow a hacker to gain full control over that computer.
I will include a link to that talk if you're interested.
But the cool thing here and cubes when you connect a USP device it will not allow that device to register
itself as a keyboard first.
And it wasn't connected to a virtual machine.
It will detect the device what it will wait for you for the user to select which domain or which virtual
machine you can connect this to.
And then even if that code get executed it will only hack into the machine that you connected to and
it will be very difficult to move from that machine and compromised the other machines.
You can even connected to a disposable virtual machine to do untrusted tasks and we'll talk about untrusted
virtual machines in the next lecture.
So stay tuned for that now first of all before I connect my US b device if you go in here to the top
right you will see all of the devices connected to the cubes operating system right now.
And a lot of these right now are built in devices in my computer.
I haven't really connected much with us.
So we're going to remember what's in here now.
I'm going to close this window and I'm going to connect my storage device.
And as you can see we get a notification that the device is ready to be used.
But if we look in any of these machines you'll see that we don't have access to this device to connect
this device to a virtual machine or to a domain.
We're going to go to the devices in here again and you'll see we have the device in here.
This is the name of the device that came up in the notifications.
It's also the extra device that didn't exist before when we opened the list.
And if we hover over it you'll see that it's going to list all of the running domains all of the running
virtual machines that we can connect the device to.
So right now we only have the personal and the work running the ones that we can actually use.
And let's say I want to connect this to my work virtual machine or to my work domain.
All you have to do is literally just click on this and you'll get a notification telling you that it's
going to connect it to the work domain and give it just a little bit of time and then we're gonna go
to our other locations and as you can see we have it right here my 8 gigabyte volume we can double click
it to access it and then interact with its files exactly the same way that you would and most other
operating systems again that will collect to open right click to get the options copy and paste like
I showed you.
And so one so that's it for this lecture.
I just wanted to show you some of the tasks that you're going to be using a lot.
And through that I also wanted to help you understand how these domains are completely separated from
each other and how this separation can make the whole operating system more secure.
Or help us improve our security.