Exodus Intelligence Details Zero-Day Vulnerabilities In Tails OS

"Tails OS, the Tor-reliant privacy-focused operating system made famous by Edward Snowden, contains a number of zero-day vulnerabilities that could be used to take control of the OS and execute code remotely. At least that's according to zero-day exploit seller Exodus Intelligence, which counts DARPA amongst its customer base. The company plans to tell the Tails team about the issues "in due time", said Aaron Portnoy, co-founder and vice president of Exodus, but it isn't giving any information on a disclosure timeline. This means users of Tails are in danger of being de-anonymised. Even version 1.1, which hit public release today (22 July 2014), is affected. Snowden famously used Tails to manage the NSA files. The OS can be held on a USB stick and leaves no trace once removed from the drive. It uses the Tor network to avoid identification of the user, but such protections may be undone by the zero-day exploits Exodus holds." -- source: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/07/22/165231 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174

While the "zero-day" claims by Exodus Intelligence may capture the attention of the news media, it is significant that TAILS version 1.1 was released yesterday. After almost 5 years in existence and 35 0.x releases, earlier this year TAILS V1.0 was released. Yesterdays V1.1 release has TAILS upgraded to using Debian V7 (wheezy) as its base, using LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice, UEFI boot support (which should make TAILS boot on modern hardware and Mac computers) and replacing the Windows XP camouflage with a Windows 8 camouflage. For the full release notes... https://tails.boum.org/news/version_1.1/index.en.html cheers, Ian.
participants (2)
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Ian Stewart
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Peter Reutemann