Security-Focused Tails OS Plans To Switch From Xorg To Wayland
2020 was a great year for Tails OS, which received major improvements such as support for Secure Boot and hardware cryptocurrency wallets.
Now with the new year 2021, the Tails OS team has shared the latest development plan for 2021, where it aims to improve some core features of Tails OS, especially for censorship circumvention.
For those unaware, Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) OS is a security-focused Debian GNU/Linux-based operating system.
The team wants to completely redesign the process of starting a Tor web browser and configure Tor bridges.
As some of the countries where accessing Tor is blocked to circumvent censorship like Russia, and China, the new design would make it easier for them to use Tor bridges.
Additionally, to persist Tor bridges, they have also planned to improve the interface of the Persistent Storage settings, starting with its core features and rewriting this 9-year-old Perl application into Python GTK+.
Another important update to Tails OS that the team is planning to bring is the replacement of X.org server with a new and modern Wayland display server protocol for its GNOME desktop.
Subsequently, Wayland will not only improve applications interaction with rest of the system, but also the security of all applications in Tails like restricting the use of invisible Unsafe Browser to deanonymize users by attackers.
At last, Tails 5.0, which might arrive at the end of 2021, will be based on the Debian 11 “Bullseye” to bring more new updates and the latest versions of software included in Tails OS.
Regarding the next monthly release, Tails 4.15 is scheduled to be released on January 26.
Via — 9to5linux
