[[!meta title="Security audit of automatic upgrades and recent changes"]]

[[!meta date="Fri, 16 May 2025 17:39:24 +0000"]]

[[!pagetemplate template="news.tmpl"]]

[[!tag announce]]

[[!tag security/audit]]

Late 2024, [Radically Open Security](https://www.radicallyopensecurity.com/) conducted another security audit of critical parts of Tails.

To better protect our users, we addressed the security vulnerabilities as soon as they were discovered and reported to us, without waiting for the audit to be complete and public.

We can now share with you the [final report](https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/-/project/2/uploads/8e2864e7271d1a34d4419f1cb70ebd18/tails-ros-penetration-test-report-2024.pdf).

The auditors concluded that:

> The Tails operating system leaves a strong security impression, addressing
> most anonymity-related concerns. We did not find any remote code execution
> vulnerabilities, and all identified issues required a compromised
> low-privileged `amnesia` user – the default user in Tails.
>
> Looking back at the [[previous audit|audit_by_ROS]], we can see the Tails
> developers have made significant progress, demonstrating expertise and a
> serious commitment to security.

Findings

The auditors did not identify any vulnerability in:

The creation of the Persistent Storage with LUKS2, introduced in [[Tails 5.14|version_5.14]] (June 2023)

- Our security improvements to [[*Thunderbird*|doc/anonymous_internet/thunderbird]]

- The random seed feature, introduced in [[Tails 6.4|version_6.4]] (June 2024)

The auditors found 4 issues in:

- The automatic upgrade mechanism

- Other important changes since [[Tails 5.8|version_5.8]] (November 2023)

<table>
<tr><th>ID</th><th>Impact</th><th>Description</th><th>Issue</th><th>Status</th><th>Release</th></tr>
<tr><td>OTF-001</td><td>High</td><td>Local privilege escalation in <i>Tails Upgrader</i></td><td>[[!tails_ticket 20701]]</td><td>Fixed</td><td>6.11</td></tr>
<tr><td>OTF-002</td><td>High</td><td>Arbitrary code execution in Python scripts</td><td>[[!tails_ticket 20702]]</td><td>Fixed</td><td>6.11</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td><td></td><td></td><td>[[!tails_ticket 20744]]</td><td>Fixed</td><td>6.12</td></tr>
<tr><td>OTF-003</td><td>Moderate</td><td>Argument injection in privileged GNOME scripts</td><td>[[!tails_ticket 20709]]</td><td>Fixed</td><td>6.11</td></tr>
<tr><td> </td><td></td><td></td><td>[[!tails_ticket 20710]]</td><td>Fixed</td><td>6.11</td></tr>
<tr><td>OTF-004</td><td>Low</td><td>Untrusted search path in Tor Browser launcher</td><td>[[!tails_ticket 20733]]</td><td>Fixed</td><td>6.12</td></tr>
</table>

Postmortem