Tails will never try to harm you or any of our users, as a core principle of our social contract. As part of that commitment, we have written this page to help you make an informed decision about whether you can trust Tails.

We think that Tails is a trustworthy project because:

• Our work is public

  • Tails is Free Software and security researchers can examine our source code.

  • Known issues in Tails are described publicly in our GitLab issue tracker. We might hide embargoed security vulnerabilities in Tails while we work on a solution, but only as a way of protecting our users.

  • The most sensitive parts of Tails are explained in our design documents.

• Tails is based on Tor and Debian

  The software included in Tails is either written by us or inherited from Debian and other Tor projects:

  • Debian is the Linux distribution with the most derivatives, including Ubuntu.

    Debian and its derivatives are the most popular Linux distributions on web servers across the Internet.

    The Debian project is coordinated over the Internet by a team of volunteers whose work is entirely public. All this makes Debian one of the Free Software projects under the most scrutiny by security researchers.

  • Tor is the best anonymity network available.

    Tails is made by the Tor Project, the same organization that makes the Tor software and Tor Browser.

    Tor has partnered with leading research institutions and has been subjected to intensive academic research. Tor has received awards from institutions such as the EFF and the Free Software Foundation. Even the NSA qualified Tor as "the King of high secure, low latency Internet Anonymity."

• Our downloads are verifiable

  Making sure that our users are really downloading an unmodified version of our work is also critical to trust and security:

  • Our downloads are reproducible to make sure that the process of building the downloads from our source code was not altered by our own infrastructure.

  • We provide strong and easy-to-use verification mechanisms to make sure that our users are downloading a genuine copy of Tails.

• Tails is recommended by renown and diverse people and organizations

  See also our list of sponsors.

Tails is part of the Tor Project, a global non-profit developing tools for online privacy and anonymity. To better protect you, the same people are building the Tor network, the Tor Browser, and Tails.

Tor Project and Tails joined forces in 2024.

If you look at the way post-2013 whistleblowers have been caught, it is clear the absolute most important thing you can do to maintain your anonymity is reduce the number of places in your operational activity where you can make mistakes. Tor and Tails still do precisely that.

— Edward Snowden,
NSA whistleblower

One of the most robust ways of using the Tor network is through a dedicated operating system that enforces strong privacy- and security-protective defaults. That operating system is Tails.

— EFF,
Electronic Frontier Foundation