Download Tails 5.12

Tails stands for The amnesic incognito live system and is a live Linux distribution that focuses on privacy and anonymity. It uses Debian GNU/Linux as a base and adds a Gnome environment with Tor, Tor Browser, Pidgin, Thunderbird, Electrum, LibreOffice, GPG and KeePassXC. For more information please refer to this page. Version 5 is based on Debian 11 and, among other things, OpenPGP has been replaced by Kleopatra. The following changes and improvements have been made in version 5.12:

Data deletion when deactivating a feature of the Persistent Storage

After you turn off a feature of the Persistent Storage, you can now click the Delete Data button to delete the data stored for this feature.

Passphrase suggestion when creating the Persistent Storage

When creating the Persistent Storage, a random and very secure passphrase is now displayed as a suggestion. This passphrase uses the diceware method to give very strong security guarantees while being possible to memorize. For example, a six-word passphrase like we suggest would take 3 505 years to crack at a trillion guesses a second. Learn more about the maths in The Intercept: Passphrases That You Can Memorize — But That Even the NSA Can’t Guess.

Changes and updates

• Update Tor Browser to 12.0.5.
• Update the Linux kernel to 6.1.20. This improves the support for newer hardware: graphics, Wi-Fi, and so on.
• Use a new icon for the backup utility for the Persistent Storage.

Fixed problems

We fixed several reliability issues with the Persistent Storage:

• We improved the error message when a feature of the Persistent Storage fails to activate from the Welcome Screen to clarify which feature is affected.
  After starting Tails, the feature that failed to activate is marked as such in the Persistent Storage settings. You can try turning the feature off and on again or deleting its data to reset it entirely. We made the activation of the Persistent Storage more reliable in 2 error cases. (#19376 and #19331)
• We added a progress indicator while turning on a new feature to clarify that it can take some time. (#19291)
• We made sure that all data that is already available in Tails is really copied to the USB stick when turning on a feature. (#19368)

For more details, read our changelog.