Limitations and known issues

Warning

SecureDrop Workstation is currently in a closed beta, and we do not recommend installing it for production purposes independently. See our blog post for more information.

Reporting issues

For the duration of the pilot, bugs and other issues found in SecureDrop Workstation should be reported by pilot participants via the support portal. Issues that are not instance- specific will be added to the appropriate public issue tracker by the developers, for example:

Current known issues

  • Updates are slow due to the number of VMs involved, and due to some updates being fetched over Tor. We are investigating various strategies to improve performance and reliability of the updater.

  • SecureDrop instances with very large numbers of sources may encounter UI performance issues. While performance improvements are on the roadmap, our recommendation is to delete information from the servers as regularly as possible, both for performance and security reasons.

  • There is currently no mechanism for cancelling or retrying file downloads. This feature is planned.

  • Printer support is limited to a specific HP printer model, and printing different file types is not as reliable yet as under Tails. Support for additional non-networked printers will be added in a future release.

  • Currently, only app-based two-factor authentication (TOTP) is supported.

  • The SecureDrop Client does not currently handle files that are “double-encrypted” (when a source pre-encrypts a submission locally before uploading it to SecureDrop). Until this is fully supported, we suggest using the Tails-based Secure Viewing Station for pre-encrypted submissions.

  • There are a limited number of file types that can be viewed on SecureDrop Workstation. Some file types (such as .webp, .heic) are not yet supported for viewing, and must be exported via USB, and/or viewed using the Tails-based Secure Viewing Station. Broader file type support is planned.

  • If the Submission Key for your SecureDrop server was rotated in the past, you must manually re-add the old key to your vault VM (sd-gpg) in order to view old submissions in SecureDrop Client. Contact Support for assistance.