Whonix Project Activities: Innovation, Cooperation and Education

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• Project Activities
• Why Freedom Software / Open Source
• Contributors
• Mission and Vision
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Things the Whonix project is working on; Innovate; Cooperate; Mentor; Educate; Maintenance; Research

Whonix Project Activities

Innovation

Table: Whonix Innovation

Category	Description
Anonymity	Thinking hard about obscure attacks on anonymity such as clock correlation deanonymization attacks and developing countermeasures; see TimeSync. Adding support for multiple anonymity networks to cater to different user bases.
Invent mechanisms for rapid Debian packaging	genmkfile - easy and turbo packaging of scripts and configuration files. Demonstrating how to write hassle free man pages. For example, the following methodology is used for all related Whonix packages. Written in markdown. Just three lines of packaging is required. https://github.com/Kicksecure/tor-ctrl/blob/master/man/tor-ctrl.8.md https://github.com/Kicksecure/tor-ctrl/blob/master/debian/control#L9 https://github.com/Kicksecure/tor-ctrl/blob/master/debian/control#L17-L18
Holistic focus	Focusing on the anonymity and privacy field, without getting into unimportant details. Understanding issues regular users are experiencing and creating a better user experience.
Develop concepts	Emergency Security News Notification Permanent Takedown Attack Defender, proposal to defend against a permanent takedown threat apt-revoker Check for Revocation Certificates before running apt Package manager update security on/off switch And much more.
Miscellaneous	Maintaining a general interest in security matters, scrutinizing solutions, and connecting people.
Documentation	Huge wiki. 100's of wiki pages. See Documentation and Design. Lots of Wiki Enhancements. .

Cooperation

Table: Whonix Cooperation

Category	Description
Issue/bug reports	Reporting issues or bugs at other projects, such as: Qubes VirtualBox
The Tor Project	Successfully communicate issues in the Tor ecosystem and do so whenever we find something. Some suggestions have been implemented and others accepted. https://web.archive.org/web/20201028003446/https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?reporter=proper&col=id&col=summary&col=status&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&col=component&order=priority https://web.archive.org/web/20201021121818/https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?reporter=adrelanos&col=id&col=summary&col=type&col=status&col=priority&col=milestone&col=component&order=priority Reporting any security/privacy/anonymity issues discovered, including some which could lead to deanonymization. Please press on expand on the right for a list of references. do something about TLS HELLO gmt_unix_time get independent from host clock time / insecure NTP use Valid-Until field to prevent downgrade attacks for deb.torproject.org use sha256 or sha512 instead of sha1 for deb.torproject.org deactivate Check for new messages on startup deactive submit performance data deactivate Check for new messages every 10 minutes enable connection security by default Remove "This Plugin is Disabled" click-through set plugin.expose_full_path to false Adapt Tor installer to allow users to avoid connecting to the public tor network Add warning related to Identity correlation through circuit sharing spoof history.length - browser.sessionhistory.max_entries Linux TCP Initial Sequence Numbers may aid correlation
Other collaborative efforts/contributions	kloak - Keystroke Anonymization Tool https://web.archive.org/web/20170511021801/https://secure-os.org/pipermail/desktops/ zuluCrypt
Developer community	Coordination of an active developer community, see: Whonix contributors. Whonix contributions: founder adrelanos developer troubadour developer madaidan former developer 0brand developer HulaHoop developer Jason Ayala developer Algernon developer Sirus Shahini incomplete list
Miscellaneous	Flexible packaging to allow cherry-picking of functionality by privacy and non-privacy distributions alike: https://github.com/Whonix/anon-meta-packages/blob/master/debian/control Providing all Whonix improvements to Debian as reusable (by others) packages split by functionality: https://github.com/Whonix Use many packages developed by Whonix with Debian too. Timely review and merging of contributions.
Based on Whonix	SecureDrop Journalist Workstation based on Qubes-Whonix

Mentoring

• Google Summer of Code
• Google Season of Docs (GSoD)
• CS Student Capstone (Bachelor's Senior project) for Whonix

Education

Whonix undertakes a broad range of educational activities, including:

• Extensive Documentation covering technical aspects and operational security.
  • Security and anonymity matters are documented in detail, including unique material not covered elsewhere.
  • Technical documentation is also provided, for example: Configuration Files.
• Whonix answers are seldom disputed; for example see answers by Patrick Schleizer on Tor Stack Exchange.
• Operating a responsive forum, providing user support for the community.
• Debian derivative development documentation, for example: About Debian Packaging

Maintenance

Whonix maintenance activities are wide in scope and include:

• Following developments in anonymity, security and privacy and formulating solutions.
• Maintaining various components.
• Ongoing development:
  • Refer to this subset list of Whonix git commits; and
  • ~ 16 Whonix source code repositories.
• Keeping the whonix.org server safe and up-to-date with various webapps (website, wiki, forums and issue tracker).
• Testing new packages.
• Calling for testers, then reviewing and processing feedback from testers.
• Creating downloadable Whonix builds.
• Keeping the community informed about recent developments at Whonix.
• Porting to the next stable version of Debian.

TODO expand

Research

See Research.

Kicksecure

• Introduction: Whonix Documentation Introduction, User Expectations, Footnotes and References, User Expectations - What Documentation Is and What It Is Not
• Whonix is based on Kicksecure^™: Whonix inherits many features and principles from Kicksecure.
• Kicksecure is based on Debian: Kicksecure builds upon the stability of Debian.
• Inheritance: Therefore, Whonix is also based on Debian.
• Debian is GNU/Linux-based: Debian primarily uses the GNU/Linux as its foundation.
• Shared documentation benefits: Because one distribution is based on another:
  • Inherited documentation: Little specific documentation is required for each layer.
  • Shared principles: Features and principles often remain consistent across forks. Users can often follow the same instructions for both Whonix and Kicksecure.
• Keep using Whonix: This does not mean the user should switch to Kicksecure.
• Where to apply the instructions: The instructions should be applied inside Whonix.
• Wiki editors notice: This box is wiki template upstream_wiki. (Pages that link to it.)
• Comparison: Whonix versus Kicksecure
• Documentation compatibility: Since Whonix is based on Kicksecure, the user can follow these instructions for What we do . Apply the instructions inside Whonix, not Kicksecure.
• Note: Re-interpretation...

Kicksecure: Perform these steps inside Kicksecure.

Instead the user should apply the instructions inside Whonix-Workstation.

Kicksecure for Qubes: Perform these steps inside Qubes kicksecure-17 Template.

Instead the user should apply the instructions inside whonix-workstation-17 Template.

Footnotes

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