I've been working on a setup using VirtualBox that uses the Whonix Gateway as a Tor middlebox and I am planning on using Ubuntu for the workstation. I don't plan on storing any information on the Ubuntu VM since I only want to use it for secure browsing.
My question is whether or not it would be more secure to simply create the virtual machine, click "Try Ubuntu," setup the configuration I need to access the internet through the Whonix gateway, and save a snapshot of the system rather than creating a virtual hard drive and installing Ubuntu.
I feel like this method would be substantially more secure due to the fact that there is no persistence from one session to another, since I would just be reloading the snapshot whenever I want to use it. However, it would be lacking security in the sense that I would not have the option to use Ubuntu's drive encryption to protect the machine that way (as far as I know). Any advice on the subject would be appreciated
For what it's worth, the data for the virtual machines are already inside an encrypted volume on the host, so I guess that may at least help with the encryption issue mentioned above.