This guide presents an overview of the SecureDrop system for a journalist. It covers the core functions necessary to start working with the platform: logging in securely, viewing documents, editing documents, and interacting with sources.
You should keep your SecureDrop workstations updated with:
- Tails updates
- SecureDrop workstation updates
You should apply Tails updates to your Tails drive as they are released, as they often contain critical security fixes. The Journalist Workstation Tails drive, once booted and connected to Tor, will alert you if upgrades are available. For most Tails upgrades, you can simply follow the steps in the Tails Upgrader that appears on screen to update your Tails drive. However, sometimes Tails upgrades are "manual" which means that you should follow the instructions in Tails Upgrade Documentation to upgrade the drives. Talk to your SecureDrop administrator if you have trouble.
Each journalist needs a personal GPG key for encrypting files. A GPG key has two parts: a public key and a private key. The private key, used for decryption, stays on the Journalist Workstation. The public key, used for encryption, is copied to the Secure Viewing Station.
If you do not yet have a GPG key, follow the instructions for your operating system to set one up:
Journalists viewing documents on SecureDrop must connect to the Journalist Interface using the Tails operating system on a USB drive. Your admin can help provide you with a Tails drive.
Important
See our guide on setting up Tails for the Admin
and Journalist Workstation <tails_guide> before continuing.
Note
The Tails OS makes using SecureDrop very different from other computing experiences. The added layers of security mean extra steps each time you want to login. With practice, you will become increasingly comfortable with the process.
Each journalist has an authenticated Tor hidden service URL for logging in to the Journalist Interface. This must be done using the Tails operating system. Click the Journalist Interface icon on the desktop. This will open Tor Browser to a ".onion" page. Log in with your username, passphrase, and two-factor authentication token, as shown in the first screenshot below. (See Using YubiKey with the
Journalist Interface <yubikey_setup>.)
If necessary journalists may reset their user passphrase or two-factor authentication token in their user profile. To navigate to your user profile, log in to the Journalist Interface and click on the link in the upper right of the screen where it says Logged on as <your user name>.
If you have lost or forgotten your passphrase or two-factor authentication device, you will need to contact your SecureDrop admin for assistance.
When a SecureDrop has little activity and receives only a few submissions every other week, checking the Journalist Interface daily only to find there is nothing is a burden. It is more convenient for journalists to be notified daily via encrypted email about whether or not there has been submission activity in the past 24 hours.
If the email shows submissions were received, the journalist can connect to the Journalist Interface to get them.
This is an optional feature that must be activated by the
administrator <admin>. In the simplest case a journalist provides her/his email and GPG public key to the admin. If a team of journalist wants to receive these daily alerts, they should share a GPG key and ask the admin to setup a mail alias (SecureDrop does not provide that service) so they all receive the alerts and are able to decrypt them.
If any sources have uploaded documents or sent messages, they will be listed on the homepage by codename.
Note
Codenames that journalists see are different than the codenames visible to sources.
Click on a codename to see the dedicated page for that source. You will see all of the messages that they have written and documents that they have uploaded. If the name of a source is difficult to say or remember, you can rename a source using the Change codename button next to their current codename.
Tip
You can also Star interesting or promising sources to easily return to them later.
If you want to reply to the source, write your message in the text field and click Submit.
Once your reply has been successfully submitted, you will be returned to the source page and see a message confirming that the reply was stored. The source will see your reply the next time they log in with their unique codename. To minimize the impact of a source codename being compromised, the source interface encourages the source to delete the reply after reading it. Once a source has read your reply and deleted it from their inbox, a checkmark will appear next to the reply in the interface.
Note
Prior to SecureDrop 0.9.0, replies when deleted from the source inbox would also disappear from the journalist inbox. As such, if there are older conversations, there may be discontinuities in the conversation.
You may also delete replies if you change your mind after sending them.
Documents and messages are encrypted to the SecureDrop installation's GPG public key. In order to read the messages or look at the documents you will need to transfer them to the Secure Viewing Station. To recall the conversation history between your organization and sources, you can also download replies and transfer them to the Secure Viewing Station for decryption.
If the server experiences a large number of new sources signing up at once and is overloaded with submissions, you will need to flag sources for reply before you can communicate with them. Click the Flag this source for reply button.
After clicking the Flag this source for reply button, you will see this confirmation page. Click through to get back to the page that displays that source's documents and replies.
You will not be able to reply until after the source logs in again and sees that you would like to talk to him or her. So you may have to sit and wait. After the source sees that you'd like to reply, a GPG key pair will automatically be generated and you can log back in and send a reply.
Documents sent by sources can only be viewed on the Secure Viewing Station. After clicking on an individual source, you will see the page below with any messages that source has sent you. Click on a document or message name to save it, or select a number of documents and save them all at once by clicking Download Selected.
A dialog box will appear asking if you want to Open or Save the file. Select Save File:
In order to protect you from malware, the browser in Tails will only allow you to download documents to a special persistent folder located at /home/amnesia/Tor Browser.
Tip
The special folder mentioned here is called Tor Browser, not "Persistent." Attempting to download directly into the Persistent folder will only lead to frustration.
Once downloaded to this folder, move the document to the designated USB stick you intend to use to transfer the documents from your Journalist Workstation to the Secure Viewing Station. This storage device will be known as your Transfer Device.
Eject the Transfer Device from the Journalist Workstation.
Next, boot up the Secure Viewing Station using Tails and enter the passphrase for the Secure Viewing Station persistent volume. Once you have logged in, plug in the Transfer Device.
Note
The Secure Viewing Station and Journalist Workstation are on separate Tails USB drives.
Click on the computer icon on your desktop, then on the Transfer Device. Drag and drop the file into your Persistent folder.
Important
Copy these documents to the Persistent folder before decrypting them. Otherwise you might accidentally decrypt the documents on the USB stick, and they could be recoverable in the future.
After successfully copying, erase the files from your Transfer Device by returning to the Transfer Device folder. Right click on the files that need removal and click "Wipe" to securely delete the files from your device.
To decrypt documents, return to your Persistent folder and double-click on the zipped file folder. After you extract the files, click on each file individually. A prompt will ask you for the application PGP key passphrase to decrypt the document.
When you decrypt the file it will have the same filename, but without ".gpg" at the end.
You can now double-click on the decrypted file to open it in its default application.
If the default application does not work, you can right-click on the document and choose Open with Other Application... to try opening the document with OpenOffice Writer, or Document Viewer. You might also need to right-click on a file and choose Rename... to rename a document with a proper file extension (for example, ".jpg" instead of ".jpeg").
This section describes how to handle unusual file formats, safely research submissions, remove metadata, and mitigate risks from submitted malware.
SecureDrop accepts submissions of any file type. Tails comes with pre-installed applications for securely working with documents, including the Tor Browser, an office suite, graphics tools, desktop publishing tools, audio tools, and printing and scanning tools.
SecureDrop sources can optionally encrypt prior to submitting to SecureDrop. This means that once you decrypt the document as you usually do by double clicking the document in the file navigator, there will be another layer of encryption.
Most often, the file will be encrypted to the SecureDrop key. If the file is encrypted to your SecureDrop key, you should be able to double click the file as usual once more in the SVS and it should decrypt.
However, it's also possible the file is encrypted to another key, potentially your personal key. If this occurs, you will get an error message in Tails that reads "Decryption failed. You probably do not have the decryption key". To determine which key was used, if you are comfortable at the command line, you can open the Terminal, navigate to the file, and use:
gpg --decrypt NAME_OF_FILEreplacing NAME_OF_FILE with the name of the file you wish to decrypt. This command will tell you what key was used to encrypt the file. If you are not comfortable at the command line, contact your SecureDrop admin or Freedom of the Press Foundation for assistance.
Warning
Do not transfer source material off the Secure Viewing Station for decryption. Instead, transfer cryptographic keys to the SVS device for decryption and metadata removal.
Journalists should take care to research submissions using the Tor Browser, ideally in a new Tails session for highly sensitive submissions. For more information, visit the Tails guide to working with sensitive documents.
Tip
For detailed information about removing metadata from documents, check out this in-depth guide to removing metadata.
Tails also comes with the Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit (MAT) that is used to help strip metadata from a variety of types of files, including png, jpg, OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents, Microsoft Office documents, pdf, tar, tar.bz2, tar.gz, zip, mp3, mp2, mp1, mpa, ogg, and flac. You can open MAT by clicking Applications in the top left corner, Accessories, Metadata Anonymisation Toolkit.
We recommend always doing as much work as possible inside of Tails before copying documents back to your Journalist Workstation. This includes stripping metadata with MAT.
Warning
MAT is no longer actively maintained and will not strip all metadata, even when the output claims the document is clean. Some metadata are likely to persist: you must never assume MAT has removed all metadata.
When you no longer need documents, you can right-click on them and choose Wipe to delete them.
As long as you are using the latest version of Tails, you should be able to open submitted documents with a low risk of malicious files compromising the Secure Viewing Station. However, even if a compromise does occur, Tails is designed so that the next time you reboot, the malware will be gone.
Never scan QR codes from the Secure Viewing Station using a network connected device. These QR codes can contain links that your connected device will automatically visit. In general, you should take care when opening any links provided in a SecureDrop submission, as this can leak information to third parties. If you are unsure if a link is safe to click, you should consult your digital security staff or Freedom of the Press Foundation for assistance.
Before moving documents back to the Transfer Device to copy them to your workstation, encrypt them to your personal GPG key that you imported when setting up the Secure Viewing Station.
To do this, right-click on the document you want to encrypt and choose Encrypt....
Then choose your public key (and, if you choose, any additional keys, such as an editor's) and click OK.
When you are done encrypting, you will have another document with the same filename but ending in ".gpg". This file is encrypted to the GPG keys you selected. You can safely copy these encrypted files to the Transfer Device to transfer them to your workstation.
Plug the Transfer Device into your workstation computer and copy over the encrypted documents. Decrypt them with GPG.
You are now ready to write articles and blog posts, edit video and audio, and begin publishing important, high-impact work!
Tip
Check out our SecureDrop Promotion Guide
<getting_the_most_out_of_securedrop> to read about encouraging sources to use SecureDrop.