We’re pleased to announce that SecureDrop 1.8.1 has been released. This is a bugfix release to provide a smoother migration experience from Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) to Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal). A complete list of changes can be found on GitHub.

What’s new in SecureDrop 1.8.1?

For administrators

• Bugfix / behavior change: When restoring a SecureDrop instance from a backup file, the SSH onion service configuration will no longer be restored. This removes the requirement to manually repair SSH access during a migration. (Issue, Pull Request)
• Bugfix: When restoring a backup against an Ubuntu 20.04 install, service definitions for v2 onion services run over HTTPS will be removed as expected. (Issue, Pull Request)
• Bugfix: After a migration to Ubuntu 20.04, you will no longer receive a recurring level 2 OSSEC alert ("Unknown problem somewhere in the system") pertaining to fwupd. (Issue, Pull Request)
• Bugfix: The SecureDrop installation will now fail with an informative error if Secure Boot is enabled in the BIOS. Secure Boot is not yet supported by SecureDrop. (Issue, Pull Request)
• Bugfix: If you have configured a custom logo for your SecureDrop instance, it will now be included in backup and restore operations. (Issue, Pull Request)
• Dependency update: pyyaml has been updated from version 5.3.1 to version 5.4.1. (Pull Request)

What administrators need to do

SecureDrop Application and Monitor Servers will be updated to SecureDrop 1.8.1 automatically within 24 hours of the release. As with previous releases, we recommend that you update your Tails workstations to the latest version of Tails and the latest version of SecureDrop. Please see our upgrade guide for instructions.

If you have not already done so, you must migrate your SecureDrop servers to Ubuntu 20.04 prior to April 30, 2021 to keep your SecureDrop operational. This also entails a migration to v3 onion services. See our advisory for details.

Questions and comments

If you have questions or comments regarding this release, please contact us:

• Via our Support Portal, if you are a member (membership is available to SecureDrop administrators on request);
• Via securedrop@freedom.press (GPG encrypted) for sensitive security issues (please use judiciously);
• Via our community forums.

We also encourage you to file non-sensitive issues you encounter in our GitHub repository (issue report form).

Thank you for using SecureDrop!