Protection applications
How do they safeguard the user?
TENS has tools that enable you to authenticate with smartcards issued by the US Department of Defense and includes the public edition of the Encryption Wizard created by the US Air Force Research Laboratory to encrypt documents and directories.
Besides Tor, Tails has AppArmor for application isolation; PWGen for generating strong passwords; KeePassX for managing them and AirCrackNG for auditing wireless networks. There’s also Electrum Bitcoin wallet, Nautilus Wipe to securely delete files and MAT for zapping metadata information from files. The Pidgin instant messenger is equipped with the Off-The-Record (OTR) plugin and the distro uses scripts to wipe your RAM on reboot or shutdown to protect against forensic recovery techniques.
Whonix also uses Tor to hide your IP address and circumvent censorship and includes MAT. It uses the anonymous peer-to-peer IM, Ricochet and the privacy friendly email client combo of Thunderbird with TorBirdy. However, Whonix is much less amnesiac than Tails and the distro doesn’t take any special measures to limit what is written to disk and doesn’t encrypt saved documents by default.
Linux Kodachi includes a suite of privacy protection tools and besides Tor and VPN, there’s DNSCrypt, VeraCrypt, Peer Guardian, tools to wipe RAM, Enigmail, Pidgin OTR and more.
Subgraph OS runs many desktop applications in the Oz security sandbox. The distro includes CoyIM to encrypt Jabber chats end-to-end using OTR. Subgraph uses Ricochet and OnionShare, which is an anonymous, peer-to-peer file sharing application. Then there’s Subgraph Firewall which applies filtering policies to outgoing connections on a per-application basis and is useful for monitoring unexpected connections from applications.