Does it make sense to use Whonix to securely perform the SSH connection and administration? My ulterior motive is to remain anonymous to the VPS provider so that the VPS provider cannot trace the connection back to me. I would set up the SSH connection to the VPS as an Onion service. Is that safe and anonymous?And have I forgotten something about the safety of the connection?
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If you need to do keep yourself anonymous from the VPS provider you SHOULD access it using Tor for the first time, and in addition to that, create a onion url redirecting to the port 22 (or where you have running ssh port), to be able to access your server with a complete set up of tor nodes.
Into whonix you can use torsocks for stream isolation in the ssh connection.
Read:
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If what you’re asking is, can you use Whonix-Workstation to SSH into an SSH server provided over a .onion link, and will you be anonymous doing that, then:
- Yes, you can SSH to .onion services if they have an open SSH port. Works the same way any other Tor traffic works.
- Whether you will remain anonymous or not depends on what data you send to the remote server. Whonix-Workstation will prevent your connection from leaking information about you by ensuring it goes over Tor, and there’s a uwt wrapper for ssh that should provide stream isolation if I’m understanding correctly. kloak should help obfuscate typing rhythm so that you don’t leak (as much) biometric data to the server. Of course, if you equip the remote VPS with an SSH key that can be traced back to you, or if you upload personal information to the server, you’ll lose anonymity.
Like spartack said, don’t set up the VPS over clearnet or access it over clearnet. Otherwise the provider can correlate your identity to your actions.
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