[2] She became known in the security community after the Black Hat Briefings conference in Las Vegas in August 2006, where Rutkowska presented an attack against Vista kernel protection mechanism, and also a technique dubbed Blue Pill, that used hardware virtualization to move a running OS into a virtual machine.

In a 2009 blog post she coined the term "evil maid attack", detailing a method for accessing encrypted data on disk by compromising the firmware via an external USB flash drive.

[9] In 2010, she and Rafal Wojtczuk began working on the Qubes OS security-oriented desktop Xen distribution, which utilizes Fedora Linux.

[10] Its main concept is "security by compartmentalization", using domains implemented as lightweight Xen virtual machines to isolate various subsystems.

[11][12][failed verification] It is fairly unique in its capabilities, having a design informed by research on proven vulnerabilities in the trusted compute base (TCB), that are unaddressed in most common desktop operating systems.