Speaking at Qubes OS Summit 2026

I will speaking (remotely) at the Qubes OS Summit 2026 at the end of October: Making Qubes and SecureDrop better, together.

Here's the abstract:

SecureDrop uses Qubes OS to power its next-generation journalist workstation because of its strong security properties. Over the years we have developed a good working relationship with the Qubes team, including financially supporting development in a way that benefits all Qubes users. At the same time, SecureDrop has also benefited from improvements in Qubes that we never thought to ask for or could imagine. Instead of fearing the churn and busy work caused by major Qubes upgrades, we look forward to them because we get a new set of features that make our lives easier.

After briefly introducing the SecureDrop Workstation for context, this talk will cover a number of features that the SecureDrop team asked for and/or financially supported, as well as features that Qubes introduced independently that benefited us. Some of these are big headline features, while others are small, niche ones. For example, we had a long running task to introduce per-source dispVMs to avoid journalists having to wait for a dispVM to launch, which was resolved by the introduction of preloaded dispVMs. Or the introduction of QubesDB’s vm-config, which allowed us to dramatically simplify our provisioning and configuration logic while improving our security posture through dispVM adoption.

Finally the talk will conclude with a small wishlist of upstream improvements we’d love to see and what we hope to accomplish next.

The talk is scheduled for 11:20am CET / 6:20am EST on Oct. 30, 2026; it should be recorded and likely livestreamed too.