Neha Patil (Editor)

Tails (operating system)

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Developer
  
The Tor Project, Inc

Working state
  
Current

OS family
  
Unix-like

Source model
  
Open source

Tails (operating system)

Initial release
  
June 23, 2009; 7 years ago (2009-06-23)

Latest release
  
2.11 / March 7, 2017; 17 days ago (2017-03-07)

Tails or The Amnesic Incognito Live System is a security-focused Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at preserving privacy and anonymity. All its outgoing connections are forced to go through Tor, and non-anonymous connections are blocked. The system is designed to be booted as a live DVD or live USB, and will leave no digital footprint on the machine unless explicitly told to do so. The Tor Project has provided financial support for its development.

Contents

History

Tails was first released on 23 June 2009. It is the next iteration of development on Incognito, a Gentoo-based Linux distribution. The Tor Project has provided financial support for its development. Tails has also received funding from the Debian Project, Mozilla, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Barton Gellman have each said that Tails was an important tool they used in their work with National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

On 3 July 2014, German public television channel Das Erste reported that the NSA's XKeyscore surveillance system contains definitions that match persons who search for Tails using a search engine or visit the Tails website. A comment in XKeyscore's source code calls Tails "a comsec mechanism advocated by extremists on extremist forums".

On 28 December 2014, Der Spiegel published slides from an internal NSA presentation dating to June 2012 in which the NSA deemed Tails on its own as a "major threat" to its mission, and when used in conjunction with other privacy tools such as OTR, Cspace, RedPhone, and TrueCrypt was ranked as "catastrophic," leading to a "near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications, presence..."

As of release 3.0, Tails will require a 64-bit processor to run.

Bundled software

  • GNOME desktop

    • Networking

  • Tor with: Stream isolation, regular, obfs2, obfs3, obfs4, and ScrambleSuit bridges support, the Vidalia graphical frontend.
  • NetworkManager for easy network configuration
  • Tor Browser, a web browser based on Mozilla Firefox and modified to protect your anonymity with: Torbutton for anonymity and protection against JavaScript, all cookies are treated as session cookies by default; HTTPS Everywhere transparently enables SSL-encrypted connections to a great number of major websites, NoScript to have even more control over JavaScript, AdBlock Plus to remove advertisements.
  • Pidgin preconfigured with OTR for end-to-end encrypted instant messaging
  • Icedove (Thunderbird) email client with Enigmail for OpenPGP support
  • Liferea feed aggregator
  • Gobby for collaborative writing of text
  • Aircrack-ng for Wi-Fi networks auditing
  • I2P, an anonymizing network
  • Electrum, an easy-to-use bitcoin client

    • Encryption and privacy

  • LUKS and GNOME Disks to install and use encrypted storage devices, e.g. for USB sticks
  • GnuPG, the GNU implementation of OpenPGP for e-mail and data encryption and signing
  • Monkeysign, a tool for OpenPGP key signing and exchange
  • PWGen, a strong random password generator
  • Shamir's Secret Sharing using gfshare and ssss
  • Florence virtual keyboard as a countermeasure against hardware keyloggers
  • MAT to anonymize metadata in files
  • KeePassX password manager
  • GtkHash to calculate checksums
  • Keyringer, a command line tool to encrypt secrets shared through Git
  • Paperkey a command line tool to back up OpenPGP secret keys on paper

    • One may choose among a large number of languages when the system is booted.

    References

    Tails (operating system) Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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