This is interesting. This also means that using encryption or anything that can plausibly make someone even slightly suspect you're using encryption (even if you are not) can make your situation worse, with certain classes of enemies.
I'm sure advanced configurations with well-crafted decoys and steganography can help combat that, but as we can see, encryption can only take you so far and it's only one element of the picture.
Well, the idea is that you don't have to be limited by Tor's speed or handicaps like being IP blocked when web browsing, if you don't want that by default. We love Tails' amnesia for anti-forensics, but we prefer Whonix's more secure Tor anonymization, if you want to be anonymous. Now you can easily combine both benefits.
We're finally sharing our github with the world. This post is the first announcement of our project apart from our thus-far non-populated subreddit. No one's discovered us yet. We've only told one person in the world before right now. We're new to developing and we're very humble and willing to learn, so any suggestions and help is welcome.
What we aren't as humble about is the potential we think this application has. HiddenVM allows full-scale anti-forensic use of any desktop OS. (No longer just Tails.) If you place your installed files inside good deniable encryption like VeraCrypt, it means that no digital trace of your chosen OS is left on your hard drive or can be forensically proven to exist. That is significant.
There are many reasons why you may want to use HiddenVM. Some use cases include:
- You're a spy protecting national security and you need to leave no digital trace on the hard drive of the computer you just used.
- Law enforcement agents conducting sensitive investigations.
- Diplomats, politicians, and military personnel.
- Whistle-blowers needing to safely carry their information in any situation.
- Activists, dissidents, political asylum seekers, and journalists in need of stronger protection of their information from corrupt governments when their equipment is forcibly seized. (We know that the risk of the rubber hose remains a complex problem and limitation of encryption.) Now that you can use Windows once you set it up inside Tails, keeping your data private could become easier for you.
Border agents forcibly invade our privacy and potentially steal our secrets with no respect to who we are or what our rights are. We need tech solutions to protect our data. More use cases include:
- Lawyers carrying sensitive client information.
- People in business protecting their IP or trade secrets.
- Tactics in fighting against corporate espionage. It could be expensive or impossible to sue for someone's unlawful intrusion into your data. Easier to technologically prevent them in the first place.
- Protect your basic privacy and dignity for any of the one thousand other reasons why privacy matters.
- You travel a lot and you want to use Windows/macOS/Linux in a way that prevents malware code from being forcibly installed inside your operating system simply because you entered a country.
- Digital currency: store a more private Bitcoin wallet. Secure your assets against unwanted and unwarranted access. When data literally is money you have a lot to lose.
- Domestic violence victims, and people in other dangerous situations in life.
Data privacy is a human right. If you don't want someone searching your naked body and violating your dignity in that way, why should your data be any different? Airport border agents not only perform a full digital strip search, but they're also potentially stealing your data or implanting spyware and malware without you knowing. It is a devastating act.
Using Tails should never be reason to suspect you are a criminal or a spy. It also protects basic data privacy and democracy. Tails should become a standard USB that anyone who values their digital safety carries around in their briefcase, bag, purse or wallet. We hope our application increases the size of the Tails user base.
Thank you for your interest. We invite you to rip apart our assertions and code (but with courtesy), try out HiddenVM, and contribute to our project.
> What we aren't as humble about is the potential we think this application has.
So you're not humble? Ditch the marketing goofiness. You think it has major potential. Be humble or don't. It's inessential to conveying what HiddenVM is.
> Like Tor, Tails, or Whonix, HiddenVM can be used for bad purposes
Unnecessary. You're already on the back foot.
> - You're a spy
This isn't a normatively 'good' reason.
> Activists, dissidents, political asylum seekers, and journalists (like Laura Poitras)
Don't cite a specific person unless that person is endorsing the product.
> Using Tails should never be reason to suspect you are a criminal or a spy. It protects basic data privacy and democracy.
Don't lead with a user story that exactly matches the stereotype, then. You're walking right into it.
Don't forget private bankers trying to evade the tax authorities:
"According to one former UBS banker, managers gave the private-wealth team specially encrypted laptops that could be easily deleted in case U.S. authorities barged in. “They told us about the computers, ‘if ever you run into problems in the U.S. with the IRS, just push button X twice, and everything will be deleted,’ ” said the banker. “It was like James Bond.”"
I may be misunderstanding how it works, but aren't the presence of Tails, the drive full of random-looking data, and the absence of a visible consumer OS all massive red flags? It seems like it would be completely undeniable that you're trying to hide something.
Red flags might not actually matter in many use cases. But where it does, setting up a decoy OS that boots on the computer by default when turned on may be one good strategy.
For a VeraCrypt volume, setting up an outer volume with convincing files and providing the decoy password may be effective.
Whether the mere possession of a Tails USB adversely affects your situation is a matter that remains to be discussed at length. There is clearly no one situation that applies to everyone.
HiddenVM's potential to provide deniability is about cryptographic deniability, not human deniability. Software can only do so much. If humans are suspicious, software alone cannot change their minds.
The thing is, if you are outside the norm, you are raising suspicion. Using this kinda setup will prevent you from flying under the radar, instead, you are painting a nice target on your back. This is gonna bite you in particular if you are already a person that your adversaries are keeping an eye on.
Right. So all we can do at our end is better document the risks and limitations, and then work on the political advocacy side of things to promote diversity and nonconformity.
Such is the spirit of Linux. Is every Linux user automatically suspicious to various enemies? If so, the work to be done is not in our code repositories.
If we could incorporate some steganography in the future that could also help. Open to ideas.
Hi, very cool project! I'm getting more into security so apologies if this is a stupid question. Is the veracrypt drive, and therefore the HVM, linked to my specific instance of tails or can it be accessed by anyone with a tails usb and my veracrypt authentication details? Also, is it possible to have tails on one usb and a veracrypt drive on a seperate USB drive? How would that effect deniability at, say, a border?
> Is the veracrypt drive, and therefore the HVM, linked to my specific instance of tails or can it be accessed by anyone with a tails usb and my veracrypt authentication details?
If someone has your VeraCrypt volume password, the volume can be unlocked by them using via any Tails stick but potentially any other operating system. What HiddenVM does is reduce digital forensic evidence of using that volume quite fundamentally.
> Also, is it possible to have tails on one usb and a veracrypt drive on a seperate USB drive?
Yes. It may be faster if you make your computer's internal SSD to be one entire partitionless hidden VeraCrypt volume.
> How would that effect deniability at, say, a border?
We want to be careful about making claims about deniability, and it's still a field we have a lot to learn about at HiddenVM. Someone more knowledgeable might dare to answer this. We already give two examples on the github page. Your situation is unique and only you can know what deniability strategy works best.
