Whonix Compared to HydraVeil
Very different projects with fairly different goals
People compare our project to Whonix, But..
Whonix and HydraVeil are very different projects with fairly different goals.
Whonix Philosophy:
Tries to make everyone the same
HydraVeil Philosophy:
Tries to make every profile different
Whonix Goal
Whonix’s primary goal is to prevent breakout of malicious apps or websites from breaking Tor and seeing your real IP address. It does so by forcing it through Tor on two virtual machines, for security against a state-level adversary.
HydraVeil Goal
HydraVeil’s primary goal is to alleviate the pain of a corrupt internet structure, where large “Content Delivery Networks” such as Cloudflare, Amazon, and Google are most of the websites, and web browsers have a fundamentally flawed structure to tattle everything about you. HydraVeil does so by offering isolated browser fingerprints, each with different IP addresses, isolated networking stack, matching timezones, and isolated realistic fake graphical displays.
Whonix Use-Case
Whonix’s primary use-case is security for darkweb market operators and extreme journalist dropboxes. These people are willing to tolerate the burdens (see below).
HydraVeil Use-Case
While HydraVeil’s primary use-case is being a realistic solution for a daily driver, in a society hostile to privacy, without inconveniencing you.
Burdens
Whonix Burdens
Whonix is a massive inconvenience. It has two large virtual machines that take up disc space, a time consuming KVM setup, Tor is slow already but then VMs add more performance drag, plus starting up two VMs takes time every single use.
Solve the Pains
While HydraVeil has zero performance drag, zero file space use, and the setup is a single command-line copy-and-pasted. If you don’t like the speed delay from Tor, then there’s double layer Wireguard. There’s also a dedicated support staff with rapid replies. And unlike Tor Browser, the user can keep cookies for fast logins.
Socks5 Proxies
Both Whonix and HydraVeil can do a Tor->socks5 proxy. But Whonix is just an OS, so the user has to learn how to do it, and then set it up on their own. On top of that, they have to manage the fingerprint of both the browsers and the logistics of the servers, to prevent cross over leaks. While as HydraVeil automates the entire process to an easy GUI click with burner crypto identities.
Requires the Enemy’s Permission
Whonix is free to use, but requires the enemy’s permission. The website has to work with Javascript restricted and allow Tor IPs. While as HydraVeil empowers the user to have privacy against the will of the enemy.
Whonix is NOT designed to do normie stuff. As we went over in a previous article on Whonix’s Negligent Display, if you have non-Tor browsers, then they are completely fingerprinted, and NOT isolated from the other stuff in the VM. Further, if anything with your name is inside the VM, then you’re just as much at risk as a regular desktop with Tor browser.
Security vs Privacy
Whonix
Whonix does offer SOME privacy benefits, such as (the often glitched, and not really proven) Kloak for typing. But it’s core privacy relies upon Tor Browser. And non-Tor browsers suffer from the same fingerprinting problems you’d get from just using it on your host.
HydraVeil
HydraVeil does offer SOME security benefits, such as isolated networking, isolated filesystem, isolated display, isolated keyboard, higher security chromium-based browsers instead of Firefox, but it’s ultimately not designed to stop state-level Tor breakout on a networking level.
Different Views on Tor & Centralization
Whonix developers think Tor is amazing, and that the biggest threat to privacy is breakout on your device to expose your IP.
HydraVeil developers think Tor has issues, such as the government runs many of the nodes. And the NSA is tapping the ocean cables, but yet Tor is indifferent to locations. That means your sensitive data packets go back and forth across the same lines with the same size.
US citizen -> Europe -> US -> Europe -> US website
Hetzner
HydraVeil devs view a major threat to privacy as the centralization of the internet. And therefore Hetzner is a threat, because they run Tor nodes, but also run the websites people use Tor to hide from. So for example many Nostr relays are hosted on Hetzner, but the users hide from them with Hetzner Tor nodes.
While as the Whonix developers literally host their website & PGP keys on Hetzner. Despite Hetzner cooperating with US law enforcement to compromise a Russian XMPP server’s SSL.
Is Tor good or not?
HydraVeil lets the end-user decide with both double layer “browser only anonymous Wireguard” and Tor->socks5 options.
What’s better Whonix or HydraVeil?
They are different. If you want to, you could even run HydraVeil inside Whonix.
