The Tails project has released Tails 6.12, the latest version of its portable operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux, designed to protect users against surveillance and censorship. This update addresses critical security vulnerabilities previously identified in Tails 6.11 by security researchers from Radically Open Security.
The discovered flaws could potentially enable an attacker to monitor Tor circuits or modify the settings of Persistent Storage. According to the Tor Project, these vulnerabilities require the attacker to have previously exploited another vulnerability to gain control over an application within Tails.
The release announcement highlights that prior versions of Tails could allow attackers to deanonymize users if they had already compromised an application.
In addition to critical security fixes, Tails 6.12 introduces several enhancements:
- An updated "About Tails" dialog that includes an option for checking system upgrades.
- A newly added keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Alt+T) for opening the Terminal.
- The Tor Browser is upgraded to version 14.0.5.
- The Mozilla Thunderbird email client is updated to version 128.6.0 ESR.
Various bugs have also been addressed, improving Python code performance, resolving issues related to the Welcome Screen, enhancing time synchronization reliability upon restarting Tor, and simplifying troubleshooting instructions for automatic upgrade failures.
For those interested, Tails 6.12 can be downloaded as a live ISO image or a USB image from the official website. Current users of Tails can update their installations by running the following commands in the terminal:
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgradeFor more details, the complete changelog is available for review.