Which of these two is the safest method for anonymous web browsing?

Question

Out of the following two, which one is safer?

1, A Virtual Machine inside a truecrypt container using tor and a private VPN

2, Just using my host OS with a private VPN & tor


The reason I ask is that I sometimes use a Virtual Machine to browse the web with tor, however is there really any security benefit of me having the whole anonymous browsing running in a separate guest OS?

I do not keep any sensitive information at all on the Guest OS so I'm wondering if it would be just as safe without, running a VM is rather heavy on my system and preforms rather slow.

Any suggestions/input would be great.

Thanks

Answer 1

In terms of the 'outside' world there will not be any difference as far as I know.



But if you are worried about security (viruses, spyware, etc.) a virtual machine which is regularly reverted to a clean state is a very good idea.



Also, if you are worried that someone with physical access to your machine will go through your hard drive looking for e.g. browsing history, an encrypted partition (or encrypted VM hard disk) should protect you. Another option is to permanently use private browsing.



P.S. The guest operating system is the one which is virtualized. Did you mean the host operating system? If there is nothing important on the host, you can do a reinstall every once in a while (this is the equivalent of reverting the VM to a clean state).

Answer 2

I agree with Jim. Running the Tor browser from your everyday OS is a waste of time.



I don't like LPS because you are trying to avoid government spying so why use an OS developed by the government.

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=lps



I am sure that it is safe, but I don't trust it (just my opinion). There are others:

TAILS

https://tails.boum.org/



Liberte Linux

http://dee.su/liberte



Don't forget to check the signatures.



DunbarPappy®ϟϟ is also correct. Truecrypt is no more.

Answer 3

One word of caution regarding "TrueCrypt":

There seems to be some sort of trouble (of yet-to-be-disclosed origins) and until the uncertainty is lifted, you may want to deploy some other utility for in-house encryption.

See: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/29/truecrypt_analysis/

Answer 4

Technically Choice #1 is much more secure, however, you should consider the "sensitivity" of your data/information you are working with. All kinds of FBI agents and other security folks keep an eye on the stuff going out of tor's onion routs. in some cases they can find where it had come from, and start asking questions like "what does this guy tries to sneak with Tor?"

I mean using tor might bring you unneeded attention that in some cases can get even over your VPN screen.

Answer 5

Both are about the same, I would just use a proxy website like http://hidemyass.com or http://ezwebproxy.com

Answer 6

what ever you use, your ISP knows all.