Introduction

What Is QuantaBox? #

QuantaBox is a desktop hypervisor, an application that lets you run complete, isolated operating systems (called guests) inside windows on your computer (the host). It is comparable to other desktop virtualization tools, with one defining difference: every virtual disk can be encrypted with post-quantum cryptography, so the data inside your VMs stays protected even against future quantum-capable attackers.

With QuantaBox you can:

• Run Linux, Windows, BSD, and macOS guests on one machine.
• Encrypt VM disks with AES-256-GCM, with the disk key wrapped by ML-KEM-768.
• Download operating systems from a built-in, checksum-verified ISO library.
• Snapshot a VM before risky changes and roll back instantly.
• Export a VM as a single encrypted package and import it on another machine.
• Connect to a running VM through an in-app VNC console or over SSH.
• Do all of the above from a modern desktop UI or the quantabox command line.

Host and Guest #

Two terms appear constantly in virtualization:

• Host: your physical computer and its operating system, where QuantaBox runs.
• Guest: the operating system running inside a virtual machine.

A single host can run many guests at once, limited only by available CPU, memory, and disk.

How QuantaBox Works #

QuantaBox is built in layers:

+---------------------------------------------+
|  Desktop UI (Tauri + Svelte)  .  CLI (qbox)  |   You interact here
+---------------------------------------------+
|  QuantaBox Core (Rust)                        |   VM lifecycle, config, disks,
|  crypto . iso . backup                        |   networking, snapshots, crypto
+---------------------------------------------+
|  Hypervisor Backend                           |   KVM / Hyper-V / Hypervisor.framework
+---------------------------------------------+
|  QEMU execution engine                        |   Runs the actual virtual hardware
+---------------------------------------------+

When you start a VM, QuantaBox builds a hardware definition from your configuration and launches it through QEMU, accelerated by your platform's native hypervisor. The desktop app and CLI are two front ends over the same core, so anything you can do in one you can do in the other. For a deeper look, see the Architecture chapter.

Hardware Acceleration #

To run guests at near-native speed, QuantaBox uses your CPU's virtualization extensions through a platform-specific backend:

QuantaBox detects the best available backend automatically at startup. You can see which one is active under Settings or by running quantabox status. For details, see Hypervisor Backends.

Post-Quantum Security at a Glance #

Traditional disk encryption protects data against today's computers but may be broken by future quantum computers using Shor's algorithm against the key exchange. QuantaBox addresses this by:

1. Encrypting each disk's contents with AES-256-GCM (a symmetric cipher believed to remain secure against quantum attacks at 256-bit keys).
2. Protecting (wrapping) the disk's encryption key with ML-KEM-768, the NIST-standardized post-quantum key-encapsulation mechanism (FIPS 203).

The result is that even an attacker who records your encrypted disks today, hoping to break them with a quantum computer later, cannot recover the key. See Post-Quantum Encryption for the user-facing workflow and Cryptography Internals for the design.

Key Concepts and Terminology #

What's Next #

Continue to Installation to get QuantaBox running on your machine, then Getting Started to build your first VM.