Hi, (Adding Tails folks into the loop; the thing is not called TAILS more than Tor is called TOR, by the way :)
I thought I would just drop some notes so that anyone interested is aware of issues that shall be taken into account (#1 below) and solved on the long term (#2 below) when considering mass-duplication of Tails USB sticks. 1. There is currently no way to verify the integrity and authenticity of a pre-installed Tails, and I don't think it will get any better in the future: in my understanding of the chicken'n'egg theory, there is no easier way to bootstrap a trust path to a pre-installed Tails thumb drive, than to bootstrap a trust path to a downloaded ISO image. If we wrote software that allows one to verify a Tails thumb drive from another, running and trusted Tails system, then the usecase we're adressing could as well be solved by just cloning the trusted one to the other thumb drive, right? I still see how it could be useful to write such a piece of software, but I'm unsure the energy needed is worth it, once the most obvious potential usecase has been debunked. 2. It will be hard to scale mass-duplication of pre-installed Tails USB sticks once we have thrown some new spicy security improvements into Tails-users land. The easiest way we've found to give the persistent volume some plausible deniability properties is to create it by default at installation time (https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/5929). The need behind this technical solution is often expressed to us, and we want to satisfy it. For this to add any security, every created persistent volume must have different key material. In this context: * Selling handmade Tails works fine, and could be scripted with a carefully crafted liveusb-creator command-line run in a loop. * The only ways I can think of to have this scale beyond 100% handmade installation feel kludgy, and it may not be trivial to ensure the result still offers plausible deniability (I'm thinking of using a USB duplicator, and then post-process the cloned thumb drives to replace the encrypted key, in the used LUKS slot, with other random data). Still, as far as 30C3 is concerned, it's totally fine to bring a hundred pre-installed Tails 0.22 sticks, and I'm very happy you are planning to do so — please just make sure they're installed in a supported, compatible with the persistence feature, way :) Cheers, -- intrigeri | GnuPG key @ https://gaffer.ptitcanardnoir.org/intrigeri/intrigeri.asc | OTR fingerprint @ https://gaffer.ptitcanardnoir.org/intrigeri/otr.asc _______________________________________________ tails-dev mailing list tails-dev@boum.org https://mailman.boum.org/listinfo/tails-dev