This release is an emergency release to fix a security vulnerability in sudo.

You should upgrade as soon as possible.

  1. Changes and updates
  2. Known issues
  3. Get Tails 4.15.1
  4. What's coming up?

Changes and updates

Included software

  • Update sudo to 1.8.27-1+deb10u3, which fixes CVE-2021-3156, a major vulnerability that allows normal users to gain root privileges.

Known issues

  • Automatic upgrades are broken from Tails 4.14 and earlier.

    To upgrade from Tails 4.14 or earlier, you can either:

    • Do a manual upgrade.

    • Fix the automatic upgrade from a terminal. To do so:

      1. Start Tails and set up an administration password.

      2. In a terminal, execute the following command:

        torsocks curl --silent https://tails.boum.org/isrg-root-x1-cross-signed.pem \
| sudo tee --append /usr/local/etc/ssl/certs/tails.boum.org-CA.pem \
&& systemctl --user restart tails-upgrade-frontend

        This command is a single command that wraps across several lines. Copy and paste the entire block at once and make sure that it executes as a single command.

      3. Approximately 30 seconds later, you should be prompted to upgrade to the latest version of Tails. If no prompt appears, you might already be running the latest version of Tails.

See the list of long-standing issues.

Get Tails 4.15.1

To upgrade your Tails USB stick and keep your persistent storage

  • Automatic upgrades are broken from Tails 4.14 and earlier. See the known issue above.

  • Automatic upgrades are available from Tails 4.15 to 4.15.1.

  • If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

To install Tails on a new USB stick

Follow our installation instructions:

The Persistent Storage on the USB stick will be lost if you install instead of upgrading.

To download only

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can download Tails 4.15.1 directly:

What's coming up?

Tails 4.16 is scheduled for February 23.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!