3 ms·

Superior Internet Privacy with Whonix

• synthoidzeta 2y ago
  Is this meant to counter the Qubes post? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42677608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42677608
  • beardog 2y ago
    More like compliment. One of the main recommended ways to use whonix is within qubes
    • Over2Chars 2y ago
      "complement" :-) Unless it just has good things to say...
    • Syonyk 2y ago
      Indeed, Whonix "just works" in Qubes! Disposable Workstation VM without Javascript enabled makes a lot of the internet quite nice. Also, makes a lot of it literally unusable. Oh well.
  • UltraSane 2y ago
    It is like a dedicated version of Qubes with a browsing VM that uses a Tor VM as a proxy.
• lenova 2y ago
  I wish homepages would say what the product actually does on the landing page. From the About section: "Whonix is an anonymous operating system that runs like an app and routes all Internet traffic through the Tor anonymity network."
  • Over2Chars 2y ago
    Turtles all the way down bro. Either you believe it's secure or you don't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKgV1e-Ec8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKgV1e-Ec8Q Man: "Did you ever go to business school?" Ice T: "No, but I sold hand grenades before"
  • wulu 2y ago
    I think the design of the Whonix website is not clear enough. After browsing the page for more than ten seconds, I still don't know what it actually is. I even thought it was some kind of new network tunneling protocol.
    • 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
      I thought it was just another VPN until I started reading their comparison chart and the (i) next to "Virus / Malware Protection " finally said it was "based on Linux". I guess I should have figured that out from the name? Silly me.
  • Syonyk 2y ago
    It could certainly stand to improve the description. Whonix is a two-VM solution for Tor use that makes it... I won't say "impossible," but "far, far harder than usual" to bypass Tor proxies and leak a direct beacon connection out. You have one "Workstation" VM with all your tools - browser, email, terminals, whatever. This is connected, and only connected, to the "Gateway" VM on a virtual network port. Everything that goes into the Gateway VM is routed out Tor - and the Gateway VM is then connected to the internet so it can join the Tor network. It works around the common way of decloaking Tor users by having some screwball edge case in the browser that ignores the proxy settings (WebRTC was used for a while, there have been others). If you can achieve this, you get a "direct connection out" from a machine using Tor, and can trivially correlate traffic if you've compromised a Tor website (so you can identify the real IP of people using the website). With Whonix, your proxy settings don't matter, because everything goes through the gateway. So the WebRTC beacon would still end up getting routed through Tor. IMO, reduces a lot of the risks of being decloaked with Tor, and is a pretty solid software-only solution - or alternately, you could use an external hardware gateway that did the same sort of thing.
• HelloUsername 2y ago
  Previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37510274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37510274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30810261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30810261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21451789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21451789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559980