How to run Superbacked on Tails

Overview

This guide walks through downloading and running Superbacked on Tails. Superbacked is distributed as AppImage binary — a portable format that runs on Tails with no installation.

Heads-up: Tails has limited printing support. Printing blocks may not work as expected depending on printer configuration. Consider saving blocks and printing from another computer or, preferably, use Superbacked OS which has better printer support.

Heads-up: for high-stakes secrets, use Superbacked OS — a hardened operating system that runs offline and persists nothing to disk.

Setup guide

Step 1: download Superbacked

Download latest release (.AppImage) from superbacked.com/download and optionally verify integrity of release.

Step 2 (optional): grant access to YubiKey

Heads-up: this step is only required when using YubiKey features and requires administration password to be set using welcome screen when starting Tails.

Run following command — a YubiKey already connected must then be unplugged and plugged back in.

$ sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/70-superbacked-yubikey.rules << 'EOF'
KERNEL=="hidraw*", SUBSYSTEM=="hidraw", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1050", TAG+="uaccess"
EOF
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Step 3 (optional): make superbacked command available in terminal

Heads-up: when reading this guide on GitHub, replace the version placeholder in the following command with the latest release version.

Heads-up: Tails does not ship wl-clipboard, so commands that copy to the clipboard need --print (or install wl-clipboard using sudo apt install wl-clipboard).

Install the AppImage as superbacked in ~/.local/bin (created if missing) and reload the profile so ~/.local/bin is on the path by running following commands — superbacked --help then lists commands.

$ install -D -m 755 "$HOME/Downloads/superbacked-x64-2.0.0.AppImage" "$HOME/.local/bin/superbacked"

$ source "$HOME/.profile"
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Usage guide

Right-click .AppImage file and select “Run” or run superbacked in terminal to use the command-line interface (see step 3).