Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: xpat on March 27, 2013, 01:05 am
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I'm only vaguely familiar with all three. I've used them all before, but like I said, I have a basic understanding of how each works. For someone who is using the road just to purchase, what would you recommend? (I understand that security and anonymity involves much more than just using one of these, but I figure it can't hurt to have the proper start)
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This is a broad topic and there have been dozens of threads written about Tails and Liberte, so I invite you to search the forum for more detailed info, but here's my opinion.
Whonix is the most secure of the three. In fact, the only thing more secure would be an anonymizing middle box (equivalent to the Whonix Gateway) on a separate physical device from your main computer. However, Whonix is overkill for your purposes. It also consumes the most resources, because you're running 2 VMs simultaneously. Unless you download potentially dangerous files a lot, you don't need it.
Between Tails and Liberte, I've seen a lot of people post about both on the forum, and my general impression is that Liberte is more hardened and advanced in *some* of its security features, while Tails is less buggy and more user friendly. For one thing, Tails uses the standard TorBrowser for web browsing, while Liberte uses a patched and torified version of Epiphany, which is the default browser in the Gnome desktop environment. Unfortunately, I've never heard of Liberte's Epiphany undergoing a thorough security review, and multiple people have complained on the forum of not being able to connect to sites over Tor. I consider it very experimental and potentially unsafe.
TorBrowser is more than just Firefox with Torbutton. It is a heavily patched version of Firefox that disables potentially deanonymizing features (which is why you should only use the TorBrowser for Tor activities, not vanilla Firefox with Torbutton). TorBrowser is the default way of using Tor. Officially built and released by the Tor Project, it has undergone the most security auditing and it the safest (not to mention the most reliable) way to browser web sites over Tor.
Tails also gets regular updates, which fix bugs and security issues, and implement new features. The latest version of Tails came out 3 days ago. The last version of Liberte came out 7 months ago. Liberte almost looks abandoned, while Tails has an active developer community behind it, and it is officially supported by the Tor Project.
If your main use case is browsing SR, I recommend Tails out of those options.
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Thanks astro, I'll take a look into the other forums. I've been particularly interested in Whonix and couldn't find much on here about it. Appreciate your opinion.
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This is a broad topic and there have been dozens of threads written about Tails and Liberte, so I invite you to search the forum for more detailed info, but here's my opinion.
Whonix is the most secure of the three. In fact, the only thing more secure would be an anonymizing middle box (equivalent to the Whonix Gateway) on a separate physical device from your main computer. However, Whonix is overkill for your purposes. It also consumes the most resources, because you're running 2 VMs simultaneously. Unless you download potentially dangerous files a lot, you don't need it.
Between Tails and Liberte, I've seen a lot of people post about both on the forum, and my general impression is that Liberte is more hardened and advanced in *some* of its security features, while Tails is less buggy and more user friendly. For one thing, Tails uses the standard TorBrowser for web browsing, while Liberte uses a patched and torified version of Epiphany, which is the default browser in the Gnome desktop environment. Unfortunately, I've never heard of Liberte's Epiphany undergoing a thorough security review, and multiple people have complained on the forum of not being able to connect to sites over Tor. I consider it very experimental and potentially unsafe.
TorBrowser is more than just Firefox with Torbutton. It is a heavily patched version of Firefox that disables potentially deanonymizing features (which is why you should only use the TorBrowser for Tor activities, not vanilla Firefox with Torbutton). TorBrowser is the default way of using Tor. Officially built and released by the Tor Project, it has undergone the most security auditing and it the safest (not to mention the most reliable) way to browser web sites over Tor.
Tails also gets regular updates, which fix bugs and security issues, and implement new features. The latest version of Tails came out 3 days ago. The last version of Liberte came out 7 months ago. Liberte almost looks abandoned, while Tails has an active developer community behind it, and it is officially supported by the Tor Project.
If your main use case is browsing SR, I recommend Tails out of those options.
great post astor, explained in such an easy to understand way - +1