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 Report on the 2013 Tails bounty program
Download Tails 0.23 March 19, 2014

Thanks to the Knight Foundation and to the Tor project, we have organized a bounty program to improve software upon which Tails is relying.

The recruiting process was long and not exactly easy, some projects did not reach completion... but four of them were successful!

  1. Removable USB in libvirt
  2. Symmetric file encryption and signature verification in Seahorse Nautilus
  3. Packaging and improving keyringer
  4. Exporting ikiwiki tickets to Redmine
  5. Encrypted /me IRC messages in Pidgin OTR
  6. Support for importing SSH keys with Seahorse
  7. Improve Vidalia

Removable USB in libvirt

Support for marking emulated USB devices as removable was added libvirt and virt-manager.

This was merged upstream by October 2013.

Symmetric file encryption and signature verification in Seahorse Nautilus

Support for symmetric encryption was added to the user interface which is presented by Seahorse Nautilus on right-click → Encrypt. Additionally, support for checking both detached signatures and text messages with cleartext signatures, as well reporting on their validity, was added to the Nautilus contextual menu.

This involved patching seahorse-nautilus, shared-mime-info, and libcryptui.

Relevant tickets:

The patches were merged upstream by December 2013.

Packaging and improving keyringer

Various improvements to keyringer were delivered, to make it more usable and easier to install:

  • Debian packaging
  • man page
  • Bash and Zsh completion

All the deliverables were approved by December 2013, and keyringer is now available in Debian.

Exporting ikiwiki tickets to Redmine

A custom ikiwiki plugin was written to help importing from the old Tails task tracker to Redmine. This included exporting ticket name, tags, and parent/child relationships in a format suitable for importing into Redmine, and creating rewrite rules to redirect ikiwiki URLs to Redmine.

All the deliverables were approved by August 2013. 887 tickets were imported in our new Redmine project.

Encrypted /me IRC messages in Pidgin OTR

The goal was to make it so /me messages in OTR conversations, when using IRC in Pidgin, are encrypted just like regular messages typed in this context.

The person we contacted to work on this bounty was not able to finish the work in due time. Since then, someone else worked on a patch, that we have successfully tested, and that is now waiting for review in the upstream bug tracker.

Ticket: https://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/15750

Support for importing SSH keys with Seahorse

The goal was to allow importing public and private SSH keys with Seahorse.

The person we contacted to work on this bounty was not able to finish the work.

Improve Vidalia

The goals were to make Vidalia better adapted to Tails needs, and to turn some of our patches into options available in the upstream code. More specifically:

  • Adapt Vidalia UI to allow users to avoid connecting to the public Tor network.
  • Support a HideSharing option in vidalia.conf to hide the "Sharing" tab of the Vidalia preferences window
  • Support a HideNewCircuit option in vidalia.conf to hide every control that trigger the "New identity" feature of Vidalia.

Tickets:

The person we contacted to work on this bounty disappeared before signing the contract.