If your Wi-Fi interface is not working, you might experience the following:

  • There is no Wi-Fi menu in the system menu:

  • The interface is disabled because MAC address anonymization failed:

    Notification: MAC address anonymization failed

    In this case, you can disable MAC address anonymization in the Welcome Screen. Doing so has security implications, so read carefully our documentation about MAC address anonymization.

  • The following notification appears:

    Activation of network connection failed
    

To connect to the Internet, you can try to:

  • Use an Ethernet cable instead of Wi-Fi if possible. Wired interfaces work much more reliably than Wi-Fi in Tails.

  • Share the Wi-Fi or mobile data connection of your phone using a USB cable. Sharing a connection this way is called USB tethering.

    See instructions for:

    Tails cannot hide the information that identifies your phone on the local network. If you connect your phone to a:

    • Wi-Fi network: the network can see the MAC address of your phone.

      This has security implications that we explain in our documentation on MAC address anonymization. Some phones have a feature to hide the MAC address of the phone.

    • Mobile data network: the network is able to know the identifier of your SIM card (IMSI) and the serial number of your phone (IMEI).

  • Buy a USB Wi-Fi adapter that works in Tails:

    VendorModelSizeSpeedPriceBuy offlineBuy online
    Panda WirelessUltraNano150 Mbit/s$18NoAmazon
    Panda WirelessPAU05Small300 Mbit/s$65NoAmazon
    ThinkPenguinTPE-N150USBNano150 Mbit/s$74NoThinkPenguin

    If you find another USB Wi-Fi adapter that works in Tails, please let us know. You can write to tails-support-private@boum.org (private email).

  • Check in our list of known Wi-Fi issues if there is a workaround to get your Wi-Fi interface to work in Tails.