Glossary
Definitions of virtualization, networking, and cryptography terms used across the QuantaBox documentation.
A-C #
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| AES-256-GCM | A 256-bit symmetric authenticated cipher used to encrypt VM disk data and packages. The GCM mode also provides integrity (an authentication tag). |
| Backend (hypervisor backend) | The platform-native acceleration layer QuantaBox drives -- KVM, Hyper-V/WHPX, or Hypervisor.framework. See Hypervisor Backends. |
| Bridged networking | A network mode where the VM gets its own address on your physical LAN and appears as a real machine on the network. See Networking. |
| Bus (disk bus) | The virtual controller a disk attaches to: VirtIO, SATA, NVMe, or IDE. |
| Cloud-init | A Linux provisioning system QuantaBox uses for unattended installs, supplied via a cidata ISO containing meta-data, user-data, and network-config. |
| Clone | A full copy of a VM (configuration and disks) under a new identity. |
D-H #
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| DEK (Disk Encryption Key) | The per-disk 256-bit AES key that encrypts a disk's contents. It is wrapped by ML-KEM-768 and stored in the key vault. |
| Engine | The QEMU execution layer (qemu-system-x86_64, qemu-img) that runs the virtual hardware and manages disks. |
| Guest | The operating system running inside a virtual machine. |
| Host | The physical machine and OS that runs QuantaBox. |
| Host-only networking | A private network shared only by the host and host-only VMs, with no internet path. |
| Hypervisor | Software that creates and runs virtual machines. QuantaBox is a type-2 (hosted) hypervisor that uses your platform's native acceleration. |
I-N #
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Internal networking | A network mode isolating VMs to talk only to each other -- no host or internet access. |
| ISO | A CD/DVD image used to install an operating system into a VM. QuantaBox includes a catalog of downloadable ISOs. |
| KEM (Key-Encapsulation Mechanism) | A scheme for securely establishing a shared secret. QuantaBox uses ML-KEM-768 to wrap disk keys. |
| KVM | The Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine acceleration, used via /dev/kvm. |
| ML-KEM-768 | The NIST-standardized post-quantum key-encapsulation mechanism (FIPS 203) QuantaBox uses to protect disk encryption keys against future quantum attacks. |
| NAT (Network Address Translation) | The default network mode; the VM shares the host's connection for outbound traffic, with inbound access via port forwarding. |
| Nonce | A number used once per encryption operation. QuantaBox derives per-sector nonces from sector indices for random-access disk encryption. |
O-S #
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| OVA / OVF | Portable virtual appliance formats QuantaBox can import; export packages are tar archives of a VM's config and disks. |
| Passthrough (USB) | Exposing a real host USB device directly to a guest. |
| QCOW2 | QEMU's Copy-On-Write disk format -- sparse and snapshot-capable; QuantaBox's default. |
| QEMU | The open-source machine emulator and virtualizer QuantaBox uses as its execution engine. |
| QVD | QuantaBox Virtual Disk -- an encrypted QCOW2 image used when PQC disk encryption is enabled. |
| Snapshot | A saved point-in-time state of a VM's disk that you can roll back to. Stored inside QCOW2/QVD images. |
| SHA3-256 | The hash function QuantaBox uses for disk and backup integrity checks. |
| Shared folder | A host directory made available inside a guest via virtio-9p. |
| SPICE | A remote-display protocol QuantaBox can use as a guest display backend. |
T-Z #
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| TCG | QEMU's Tiny Code Generator -- pure software emulation used when no hardware acceleration is available. Functional but slow. |
| Unattended installation | Automated OS installation using generated media (cloud-init for Linux, autounattend.xml for Windows). |
| VirtIO | A family of paravirtualized devices (block, net, GPU, 9p) offering the best performance. QuantaBox uses VirtIO by default. |
| VM (Virtual Machine) | An emulated computer with its own CPU, memory, disks, and devices, running a guest OS. |
| VNC | A remote-display protocol. QuantaBox embeds a noVNC client for the in-app console. |
| WHPX | The Windows Hypervisor Platform -- the acceleration interface QuantaBox uses on Windows. |
| Key vault | QuantaBox's master-key-protected store of wrapped disk encryption keys. See Cryptography Internals. |
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