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Comment by ekidd | Hacker News Reader

Interesting!

How does this compare to an existing secure Linux distro with Tor support like Tails (https://tails.boum.org/)?

Whonix theoretically provides better protection against de-anonymization via through-the-browser attacks, because it runs the Tor router and in a separate virtual machine from user applications like the browser. So if the browser is compromised, it can't "phone home" to the attacker over the regular internet: all the attacker's traffic is obliged to go over tor, unless he/she can break out of the VM.

Such an attack was used by the FBI to de-anonymize users of Freedom Hosting, a few years back. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Torpedo

See this https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Comparison_with_Others#General

What's the difference between "Live USB" and "USB Bootable"?

"live" usually means it runs entirely in memory.

I.e. without persistence

Their both Debian based desktops, so pretty similar from a user perspective.

The biggest difference is that Tails is designed to be entirely amnesiac, and leave no forensic trace. Whonix is a persistent system.

Whonix can be configured to be not persistent, and Tails can be configured to be persistent. Out of the box configuration is the biggest difference. However, Whonix is set up to be run as a set of virtual machines. One of the reasons I like Whonix better is that this dual virtual machine setup means that, should you get kicked off of Tor in the virtual machine that acts as a gateway, the other virtual machine does not have any fallback connection, effectively preventing accidental access of the internet while unprotected.

The added risk to Whonix is that if your host system is sufficiently compromised, there's no real guarantee of anonymity. A lot of people end up running Tails in a VM, though, and someone has to be pretty serious about wanting to see what you're doing for that to be a real issue.

> Tails is designed to be entirely amnesiac, and leave no forensic trace

Does Tails drop privileges to the extent that root can't mount the hard drive and modify it?

It can mount HD, but the read/write privileges are the same as any other OS I imagine. I've copied files from my HD to Tails, but I've yet to try dropping files into the shared folder on my HD.

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