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The project aims to provide guaranteed anonymity, security and protection of your private information. The distribution is based on Debian GNU/Linux and uses TOR to provide anonymity. The project's work is published on GitHub, under the GPLv3 license. Virtual machine images are available in OVA format for VirtualBox (2.5 GB with LXQt and 1.6 GB console-only), which can be converted for use with the KVM hypervisor, as well as qcow2 images for the KVM hypervisor (3.4 GB with LXQt and 2.3 GB console-only).
A distinctive feature of Whonix is splitting the distribution into two separately run components: Whonix-Gateway, which implements a network gateway for anonymous communications and Whonix-Workstation, which provides the desktop environment. The Whonix components are separate system environments, shipped inside a single download image and run in different virtual machines. Network access from the Whonix-Workstation environment is possible only through the Whonix-Gateway, isolating the workstation from direct interaction with the outside world and allowing only fictitious network addresses. This approach protects the user from leaking their real IP address in case of a web browser compromise or exploitation of a vulnerability that grants an attacker root access to the system. Compromising the Whonix-Workstation would allow an attacker to obtain only fictitious network parameters, since the real IP/ DNS settings are hidden behind the network gateway implemented by Whonix-Gateway, which routes traffic only through Tor. Whonix components are designed to run as guest systems, where exploitation of critical zero-day vulnerabilities in virtualization platforms that could provide access to the host system is not excluded. For this reason, it's not recommended to run Whonix-Workstation on the same physical machine as Whonix-Gateway. By default, Whonix-Workstation provides an Xfce user environment. The Whonix-Gateway includes a set of server applications, including Apache httpd, nginx and IRC servers, which can be used to host Tor hidden services. It's possible to forward Freenet, i2p, JonDonym, SSH and VPN over Tor tunnels. You can also run only Whonix-Gateway and connect their regular systems, including Windows, through it to provide anonymous network access for existing workstations.
The main changes and additions in Whonix 18.0:
- IPv6 support has been added.
- The nmap and nping utilities are included.
- xpdf has been removed from the distribution.
- Boot speed has been increased and memory usage optimized.
- The backlight-tool-dist package is used to manage display backlight.
- The distribution base has been upgraded from Debian 12 to Debian 13.
- The ram-wipe utility, which clears RAM contents before reboot, has been added.
- The privleap framework (an alternative to sudo) is used to launch privileged processes.
- The desktop environment Xfce has been replaced with LXQt. Wayland is used by default.
- The set-system-keymap, set-console-keymap, set-labwc-keymap and set-grub-keymap packages are used to manage keyboard layouts.
- The USBGuard package has been included to control activation of connected USB devices to protect against attacks from malicious USB devices.
- The Kloak package, used to resist user identification by keystroke dynamics and mouse movement, has been fully rewritten and ported to Wayland.
- On the Whonix-Gateway side, the user-sysmaint-split package is enabled, implementing separate boot sessions for regular operation and SYSMAINT.
