The release of Whonix 18.2 has taken place, aimed at providing guaranteed anonymity, security, and protection of private information. The distribution is based on Debian GNU/Linux and uses Tor to ensure anonymity. The developments of the project are distributed under the GPLv3 license. For download, images of virtual machines have been prepared in ova format for VirtualBox (2.6 GB with LXQt and 1.5 GB console) and qcow2 for the hypervisor KVM (4GB with LXQt and 2.3 GB console).
A feature of Whonix is the division of the distribution into two separately launched components – Whonix-Gateway with the implementation of a network gateway for anonymous communications and Whonix-Workstation with a desktop. Components are separate system environments delivered within a single boot image and run in different virtual machines. Access to the network from the Whonix-Workstation environment is made only through the Whonix-Gateway, which isolates the work environment from direct interaction with the outside world and allows the use of only fictitious network addresses. This approach allows you to protect the user from leaking the real IP address in the event of a web browser being hacked or a vulnerability being exploited that gives the attacker root access to the system.
Hacking Whonix-Workstation will allow the attacker to obtain only fictitious network parameters, since the real IP and DNS parameters are hidden outside the network gateway running on the Whonix-Gateway, which routes traffic only through Tor. It should be taken into account that Whonix components are designed to run in the form of guest systems, i.e. the possibility of exploitation of critical 0-day vulnerabilities in virtualization platforms that can provide access to the host system cannot be ruled out. Because of this, it is not recommended to run Whonix-Workstation on the same computer as Whonix-Gateway.
Whonix-Workstation provides the LXQt user environment by default. The package includes