Show HN: HiddenVM – Use any desktop OS without leaving a trace
Hello HN,<p>We&#x27;re finally sharing our github with the world. This post is the first announcement of our project apart from our thus-far non-populated subreddit. No one&#x27;s discovered us yet. We&#x27;ve only told one person in the world before right now. We&#x27;re new to developing and we&#x27;re very humble and willing to learn, so any suggestions and help is welcome.<p>What we aren&#x27;t as humble about is the potential we think this application has. HiddenVM allows full-scale anti-forensic use of any desktop OS. (No longer just Tails.) If you place your installed files inside good deniable encryption like VeraCrypt, it means that no digital trace of your chosen OS is left on your hard drive or can be forensically proven to exist. That is significant.<p>There are many reasons why you may want to use HiddenVM. Some use cases include:<p>- You&#x27;re a spy protecting national security and you need to leave no digital trace on the hard drive of the computer you just used.<p>- Law enforcement agents conducting sensitive investigations.<p>- Diplomats, politicians, and military personnel.<p>- Whistle-blowers needing to safely carry their information in any situation.<p>- Activists, dissidents, political asylum seekers, and journalists in need of stronger protection of their information from corrupt governments when their equipment is forcibly seized. (We know that the risk of the rubber hose remains a complex problem and limitation of encryption.) Now that you can use Windows once you set it up inside Tails, keeping your data private could become easier for you.<p>Border agents forcibly invade our privacy and potentially steal our secrets with no respect to who we are or what our rights are. We need tech solutions to protect our data. More use cases include:<p>- Lawyers carrying sensitive client information.<p>- People in business protecting their IP or trade secrets.<p>- Tactics in fighting against corporate espionage. It could be expensive or impossible to sue for someone&#x27;s unlawful intrusion into your data. Easier to technologically prevent them in the first place.<p>- Protect your basic privacy and dignity for any of the one thousand other reasons why privacy matters.<p>- You travel a lot and you want to use Windows&#x2F;macOS&#x2F;Linux in a way that prevents malware code from being forcibly installed inside your operating system simply because you entered a country.<p>- Digital currency: store a more private Bitcoin wallet. Secure your assets against unwanted and unwarranted access. When data literally is money you have a lot to lose.<p>- Domestic violence victims, and people in other dangerous situations in life.<p>Data privacy is a human right. If you don&#x27;t want someone searching your naked body and violating your dignity in that way, why should your data be any different? Airport border agents not only perform a full digital strip search, but they&#x27;re also potentially stealing your data or implanting spyware and malware without you knowing. It is a devastating act.<p>Using Tails should never be reason to suspect you are a criminal or a spy. It also protects basic data privacy and democracy. Tails should become a standard USB that anyone who values their digital safety carries around in their briefcase, bag, purse or wallet. We hope our application increases the size of the Tails user base.<p>Thank you for your interest. We invite you to rip apart our assertions and code (but with courtesy), try out HiddenVM, and contribute to our project.<p>Sincerely,
aforensics