Hide system information from an application | Plausible deniability

scoreless99 · December 13, 2025, 3:21am

Goal is to run a software (GUI or TUI), that presumably does intense tracking, the maximum it can, while making it after all think the user might just be “a normal PC user, can be Windows”, if not possible then “a normal Linux user, can be any distro and any kernel”, if not possible then “a normal Linux user with X.X.X kernel, Debian, but can be any Debian distro and that kernel is also used by all the people who are normal and don’t understand in the world of privacy, security, Tor”, etc. “normal”, not “extremist”. You get me.

It is totally acceptable to use special software to achieve this, but it must be freedom software and trusted.

The reason I believed this is possible despite System Identity Camouflage and Virtual Machine Cloaking and Protocol Leak and Fingerprinting Protection‎ is that these documentations might have meant 1) compromization, malicious software running, where I agree that yes it is practically impossible to hide system information, or 2) talked about the default, did not take into account the possibility of using a special software, a tool, to achieve that. Also another reason I believed it is possible is the existence of “XPrivacyLua” for Android that makes me say “will it be possible on Android and not on Linux?” Also the understanding that certainly applications do not just stretch their hands and get that information but instead they request it first from some system component and then that gets it for them - so maybe we can edit that system component or so.

If still impossible (please tell whether only CPU is the impossible or that many others are,) then what for emulators? It is stated in the CPUID wiki: “Perhaps emulators might be able to hide this information since the CPU is fully emulated (as opposed to be being virtualized) but these are too slow to be considered for production use”. Providing that the use case is very lightweight, how could that be effectively used? Note CPU hiding is least priority as most used CPUs are famous anyway, just hiding the rest / the enough to appear as “a normal, non-privacy-or-security-savvy, non-extremist person”, plausible deniability, is needed.

Lastly, sys-vpn will be used to use VPN after Tor, to lastly hide Tor usage from the application to also appear as a “normal person just used a VPN”.

Patrick · December 13, 2025, 5:56am

Try QEMU.

Try Debian inside QEMU as an exercise as per Self Support First Policy for Whonix
Try Whonix as per QEMU.

Make sure it’s QEMU without KVM. Many people call it QEMU even though they’re using KVM. You should know the difference KVM vs QEMU and experience a slow down and see a different /proc/cpuinfo to confirm it’s functional.

But it’s probably fingerprintable due to CPUID, maybe other emulated hardware peculiarities and because it’s slow.

Please let me know how QEMU is working for you.

Or perhaps bochs is even better but maybe even slower. (And probably doesn’t magically fix QEMU fingerprinting issues either.)

Check the features of the app and then see what’s applicable to desktop Linux.

FranklyFlawless · December 13, 2025, 5:57am

Qubes OS:

By default, the system qubes are configured with Fedora TemplateVMs and AppVMs, but you can swap it for Debian if you prefer that instead.

Patrick · December 13, 2025, 6:24am

Qubes isn’t designed to address the issues raised by the original poster.

Also consider:

You want to hide your keystroke and mouse biometrics? Use Whonix.

Other options at the time of writing? None that I know.

Not hiding keystroke and mouse biometrics is even worse.

But keyboard, mouse anonymization software might be fingerprintable at least in so far that it leaks the information “using keyboard, mouse anonymization software”.