Whonix ™ Project Activities: Innovation, Cooperation and Education

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 [archive] - 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/Whonix/tor-ctrl/blob/master/man/tor-ctrl.8.ronn [archive] https://github.com/Whonix/tor-ctrl/blob/a12d73ed01068baf32db067811c208034ced87fd/debian/control#L9 [archive] https://github.com/Whonix/tor-ctrl/blob/1c326b232b1f328a6542ae51f3f3afa3e1e44a55/debian/rules#L17-L18 [archive]
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-get Package manager update security on/off switch [archive] And much more.
Miscellaneous	Maintaining a general interest in security matters, scrutinizing solutions, and connecting people.

Cooperation

Table: Whonix ™ Cooperation

Category	Description
Issue/bug reports	Reporting issues or bugs at other projects, such as: Qubes [archive] VirtualBox [archive]
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://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/query?reporter=proper&col=id&col=summary&col=status&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&col=component&order=priority [archive] 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 [archive] 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 [archive] get independent from host clock time / insecure NTP [archive] use Valid-Until field to prevent downgrade attacks for deb.torproject.org [archive] use sha256 or sha512 instead of sha1 for deb.torproject.org [archive] deactivate Check for new messages on startup [archive] deactive submit performance data [archive] deactivate Check for new messages every 10 minutes [archive] enable connection security by default [archive] Remove "This Plugin is Disabled" click-through [archive] set plugin.expose_full_path to false [archive] Adapt Tor installer to allow users to avoid connecting to the public tor network [archive] Add warning related to Identity correlation through circuit sharing [archive] spoof history.length - browser.sessionhistory.max_entries [archive] Linux TCP Initial Sequence Numbers may aid correlation [archive]
Other collaborative efforts/contributions	kloak [archive] - Keystroke Anonymization Tool https://secure-os.org/pipermail/desktops/ [archive] zuluCrypt
Developer community	Coordination of an active developer community, see: Whonix ™ contributors. Whonix ™ contributions: founder adrelanos [archive] developer troubadour [archive] developer madaidan [archive] former developer 0brand [archive] developer HulaHoop [archive] developer Jason Ayala [archive] developer Algernon [archive] developer Sirus Shahini [archive]
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 [archive] Providing all Whonix ™ improvements to Debian as reusable (by others) packages split by functionality: https://github.com/Whonix [archive] Use many packages developed by Whonix ™ with Debian too. Timely review and merging of contributions.

Mentoring

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

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 ^[archive] on Tor Stack Exchange ^[archive].
• Operating a responsive forum ^[archive], 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. For example this apt bug ^[archive] led to the posting of a news item ^[archive] and instructions to safely resolve the matter.
• Maintaining various components.
• Ongoing development:
  • Refer to this subset list of Whonix ™ git commits ^[archive]; and
  • >100 Whonix ™ source code repositories ^[archive].
• 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 ^[archive].
• Porting to the next stable version of Debian.

TODO expand

Research

See Research.

Footnotes

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