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Is is technically possible to run a server, that is accessible only through Tor via SSH, and be able to hide its physical location from an adversary who happens to gain a root access?

In my world-view a common technique to discover a physical location of a computer is by looking at its "public" IP and query a geolocation database. A computer is unable to determine its "public" address unless he asks another computer on the Internet.

So is it safe to assume that by placing the server between a physical Tor gateway (i.e. OpenWrt router) and a router I could protect it from being discovered since all traffic would go through the gateway?

When I am talking about a Tor gateway I mean existing solutions such as anonabox.

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  • What you're describing is basically Whonix?
    – cacahuatl
    Jul 13, 2017 at 16:42
  • I am aware that Whonix is using a term "gateway" but I was not able to verify whether it protects a "workstation" vm against a physical discovery. Is it documented somewhere? I though it's designed this way so the tor daemon runs in a separate virtual machine in case there's an unpatched vulnerability.
    – LostGoneAndNotFound
    Jul 13, 2017 at 19:02
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    That's basically the some protection except using virtual machines and not physical ones. The concept is the same with physical machines. See: trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorifyHOWTO/…
    – cacahuatl
    Jul 13, 2017 at 19:29

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Whonix is what you want.

The Workstation VM can "see" only IP addresses on the Internal LAN, which are the same in every Whonix installation. User applications therefore have no knowledge of the user's "real" IP address, nor do they have access to any information about the physical hardware. In order to obtain such information, an application would have to find a way "break out" of VirtualBox, or to subvert the Gateway (perhaps through a bug in Tor or the Gateway's Linux kernel).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whonix

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