Whonix (/huːnɪks/, HOO-niks)[2] is a Linux distribution, based on Kicksecure OS, claimed to be security hardened by its developers.

[5][6][7] The initial concept was announced by Patrick Schleizer under the pseudonym Proper, and later changed to Adrelanos in 2012 before revealing his identity in 2014.

[8][9] His idea was to leverage a virtual machine acting as a transparent proxy to route all Internet traffic through the Tor network.

This would have allowed one to mask one's IP address, prevent DNS leaks and avoid having to configure proxy settings for individual applications (or ones who do not support them).

[10] TorBOX was at its beginning only a guide released on the Tor Project website, which also provided some shell scripts.

A secondary reason was the project's name being non-capitalized, which would have made it incompatible with the grammatical convention of capitalizing a word at the beginning of a sentence.

His original idea was a name which would have made the purpose of the anonymous operating system clear and at the same time avoided confusion or trademark issues.

[25] While many suggestions were sent, Adrelanos concluded the post announcing the new name, Whonix, and publishing a signed message with his final decision on the project's website.

[31][32][33][34] The Whonix project recognized the privacy issues which would have caused a problem with the use of Ubuntu, and recommended against using it even on the host machine.

[38] In August 2014, a user called WhonixQubes announced on the qubes-users mailing list the first successful integration of Qubes OS version R2-rc2 and Whonix 8.2.

The proposal to OTF was made initially in September 2014, after Rutkowska was approached by Michael Carbone, an employee of Access Now[40] and member of the Qubes OS team[41] who helped with the process.

[48][49] The VirtualBox packages for both the Workstation and Gateway are distributed with the xfce desktop environment or in a headless "CLI" version.

It is connected only to the internal virtual LAN, and can directly communicate only with the Gateway, which forces all traffic coming from the Workstation to pass through the Tor network.

The Whonix wiki includes a collection of operational security guides for tips on preserving anonymity while online.