News

2021-9: GNU Taler v0.8 released

We are happy to announce the release of GNU Taler v0.8.

We have addressed over 400 individual issues, our bug tracker has the full list. Notable changes include:

  • NEW: Wallet(-core) now supports backup and restore
  • NEW: WebExtension wallet now works with GNU IceCat
  • NEW: Support for terms of service endpoints in exchange and merchant
  • NEW: Optional inventory management by the merchant backend
  • NEW: Product image previews in contracts
  • NEW: Packaged merchant point-of-sale and cashier Apps for F-Droid
  • NEW: Better isolation of online private keys
  • NEW: Better isolation of sensitive exchange configuration options
  • Implemented long-polling support for refunds
  • Improved the HTTP API of the merchant to be more RESTful and easier to use
  • Improved message flow for tipping and refunds to ensure merchant knows exact state and to reduce bandwidth required by the wallet
  • Improved security of order claiming by introducing claim tokens
  • Simplified development of merchant frontends by having the backend generate HTML pages for wallet interactions
  • Significantly reduced permissions required to use the wallet WebExtension
  • Redesigned transactions view in the wallet, which unifies pending operations, history and error reporting
  • Improved usability, error reporting, robustness and stability of the wallet
  • Availability of a documented API for the wallet core, now used by all user interfaces
  • Various minor bugfixes and documentation improvements

Some of the major changes are based on the security audit performed by Code Blau in 2020. Addressing these recommendations was done as part of the NLnet Grant 2019-06-28 funded by the European Commission's great Next Generation Internet initiative under grant agreement number 825310. In particular, Code Blau had recommended strengthening the isolation of the private keys, which is now implemented using the taler-exchange-secmod-* binaries that can run under a different user ID than the network-facing taler-exchange-httpd process. Our detailed response to the audit is available here.

Download links

The wallet has its own download site here. The exchange, merchant backend, sync and bank components are distributed via the GNU FTP mirrors.

You must first install GNUnet v0.15.2 to compile GNU Taler 0.8.