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This study conducts a longitudinal analysis of 109 Qubes Security Bulletins (QSBs) and the Xen Security Advisory (XSA) tracker to assess the public advisory record's relationship to upstream vulnerabilities. By employing a combination of change-point analysis, severity-proxy weighting, and vulnerability discovery models, the research reveals that a significant majority of security advisories are linked to upstream components rather than Qubes' core logic. The findings indicate a stable yet active disclosure environment, with a notable concentration of vulnerabilities originating from upstream trust anchors, particularly highlighted by a change-point identified in early 2015.
Despite a stable public advisory record, 79.8% of Qubes security advisories stem from upstream vulnerabilities, underscoring a critical dependency on external components.
Qubes OS is a revealing case for security measurement because its architecture makes component boundaries security-relevant. We present a protocol-driven longitudinal analysis of 109 public Qubes Security Bulletins (QSBs, 2011--2025), the official Qubes-maintained Xen Security Advisory (XSA) tracker, and a secondary vulnerability-event sensitivity series. The study measures the public advisory record rather than latent vulnerability incidence or realized compromise. The methodology combines audited deterministic component attribution, change-point analysis, overdispersion checks, severity-proxy weighting, censoring sensitivity, documentary latency lower bounds, and baseline-aware evaluation of vulnerability discovery models (VDMs). The results show persistent upstream dependence in that public record. On the official tracker, 113 of 464 XSAs affect Qubes; under primary labeling, 87 of 109 QSBs (79.8\%) are attributable to Xen, CPU/microarchitectural, or other upstream components rather than Qubes-core logic, with similar results under weighted views. Change-point analyses identify 2015Q1 as the dominant break in the quarterly advisory series, while post-2018 annual disclosure rates are statistically flat. Poisson inferences are stable under dispersion diagnostics and negative-binomial sensitivity checks. The attribution codebook performs well in a stratified 30-QSB audit, and S-shaped VDMs fit descriptively but do not significantly outperform a rolling-mean baseline in short-horizon forecasts. Overall, the Qubes public advisory record appears stable, but not quiet: disclosure activity plateaus at a higher level than in the earliest years, while the observed burden remains concentrated in upstream trust anchors.