Specific groups, such as journalists, lawyers, whistleblowers, and political activists, are often the focus of intelligence agencies and other authorities. Business owners and researchers also can attract unwanted attention and find themselves the targets of attack. To communicate in an encrypted and anonymous way over the Internet and protect themselves from intrusion attempts and sniffer software, these groups often rely on special technological protections.

To shut out unauthorized eavesdroppers, the Whonix project now offers an interesting approach – but not just for these target groups: A specially hardened and isolated system with a connection to the Internet through the Tor network runs on a virtual machine (VM), allowing for encrypted and hard-to-trace communication.

Quartet

Whonix for Linux comes in four packages. In addition to a prepared gateway for VirtualBox weighing in at approximately 1.8GB, the developers supply a complete work environment based on Debian "Stable" with a size of around 2.1GB, which also runs as a separate system in VirtualBox. The two packages are completely preconfigured in OVA format and available for download [1]. Although this solution is aimed at newcomers with little network knowledge, the developers describe it as still in the test phase.

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