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Hello, Thank you for coming

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We're gonna give a talk about and 
gonna give a technical overview of Tails.

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That's kurono, intrigeri 
and I am BitingBird.

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We are all Tails contributors
in different fields.

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I don't do technical things,

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intrigeri is one of the 
oldest tails contributors

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and kurono contributes 
since two years now.

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Tails is the acronym of
The Amnesic Incognito Live System

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And here is the nice url, 
where you can have all the information.

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It's a live operating system.

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It works on almost any computer -
except ARM

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And it boots from a dvd or a usb stick

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and theoretically from sdcard too, 
but it doesn't work very well.

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The focus of our distribution 
is privacy and anonymity.

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It allows the user 
to use the internet anonymously.

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And also, when there is censorship,
to circumvent it.

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All the connections to 
the internet go with tor,

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which is an anonymization network.

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That's the first big feature of tails.

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And the second one is

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that there is no trace 
on the computer you are using

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so after you used it nobody can see
that you've used the computer.

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If somebody would grab your computer 
and search files

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they would not know, 
what you have done.

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Unless you ask for it explicitly 

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We have also a lot of data producing tools

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because some users use it to write books,
articles, video and such things.

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They want to be able to create such documents without being traced.

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Does it work ?

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We have a very good report,

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not from our users,

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actually from the people 
we are supposed to protect them against.

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The NSA says, that it's a pain in the ass.

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When the NSA says 
you're making their life harder

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somehow you're doing something right.

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[klapping, laughing]

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I guess you can imagine who's 
the famous tails user

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who gave us access to the documents where
they say that

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There is also Bruce Schneier
who says he uses Tails

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so, not bad.

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So, what are our goals?

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We took a stance in the beginning of Tails

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that it was not really common back then

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to have usability as a security feature

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because "ubergeeks" where already able
to have secure communication.

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The thing is privacy 
is not an individual matter.

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It's a collective matter.

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Everybody needs to have privacy

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and new users and non geek users 
had no way to get access to this.

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The tools existed but they had 
no user interface

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or they where really hard to configure.

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So, we designed a system that gives 
a quite good level of security

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with a quite good level of usability.

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Lots of the time people ask us, why we 
don't include more security features.

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We have to make a balance between security and usability.

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Because if it's really secure
but nobody can use it

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then it doesn't bring anything.

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It makes security accessible
for most people.

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Another important point in our project

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is to have a very small delta 
to our upstream.

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Our main upstream is Debian and we try 
to not diverge too much from it.

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Because the more you do things differently


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the more work you have to maintain.

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The work is not the work of 
implementing something once

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it's the work of 
maintaining on the long term.

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There where a lot of other 
security distributions

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and there are still a few others

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But most of them 
have a very short lifespan

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because of maintenance.

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It's a distribution and 


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we're a very tiny team compared to Debian

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but we're a team.

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Lots of other privacy distributions
where either one person

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or very tiny teams and they didn't make 
outrage to be joined by other people

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Most other privacy distributions didn't 
take into account the maintenance work

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and the user support because

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even if we try to make it usable 


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it's still a lot of work to 
teach the users how to use it

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and to document how to use it.

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Also if you want to start such a project

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you need to have a long term commitment

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and to remember to avoid the symptom of
"not invented here".

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It's quite common to try to do something 
that does exactly what you want

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but sometimes it's best 
to find an existing software

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that does something close enough

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to make the new features you want in it 
or use it as it is.

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We are trying to do most of our work,


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at least a good part of our work upstream

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so we did AppArmor

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in Debian specifically there is 
an AppArmor team,

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an anonymity tools team and an OTR team

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who work on things that we use in Tails

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libvirt, Seahorse, Tor and Puppet 
are other projects we contributed to

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instead of implementing ourselves 
what we need in Tails

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we did it upstream 
and it took longer to fall down to us


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but it's maintainable.

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When we finally have the new features

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we have no work of keeping them.

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As a result we have 
really little Tails specific code

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we mostly do glue work between the code

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we take from our upstreams

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and we do a lot of social work

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we talk to upstream, we spread the word

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we say "Oh that would be great if somebody
where to work on that"

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And we find the people that 
have the right skills 


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to do the work that should be done
when it's not in Tails

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We have a very slow rythm 
because we work in Debian

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so we have to wait until the next Debian version is released

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To see the work we have done in Tails 
as AppArmor

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I mentioned earlier, we did it in Debian

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so for two years there was work going on
in Debian that was not visible in Tails

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but we finally have it

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Tails is still alive, 
because it's maintainable

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Implementation details -

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That's where I give the micro.
[gives micro to kurono]