Tor Messenger Beta released

anvilfour

Posted October 29th 2015:

Today we are releasing a new, beta version of Tor Messenger, based on Instantbird, an instant messaging client developed in the Mozilla community Tor Messenger is a cross-platform chat program that aims to be secure by default and sends all of its traffic over Tor. It supports a wide variety of transport networks, including Jabber (XMPP), IRC, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, Twitter, Yahoo, and others; enables Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging automatically; and has an easy-to-use graphical user interface localized into multiple languages.

Full article : https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-messenger-beta-chat-over-tor-easily

The Linux builds at least can be built from source then compared to the downloadable versions on the Tor website.

How do we feel about this? Considering we still have to set up an account on a separate messaging service, is this much more secure?

hooplah

Actually you can use it with existing accounts - I gave it a go. However your messages will arrive to senders encrypted for OTR so unless they have a plugin or sim installed they won't be able to read it.

so

Pros:
you can use existing accounts such as Facebook, google, existing jabber / other irc account
it's all routed over Tor
it uses OTR

Cons:
you can't [afaik] disable OTR or allow it to be toggled so you will have to use another client for friends who don't use OTR

anvilfour

hooplah wrote: »

Actually you can use it with existing accounts - I gave it a go. However your messages will arrive to senders encrypted for OTR so unless they have a plugin or sim installed they won't be able to read it.

so

Pros:
you can use existing accounts such as Facebook, google, existing jabber / other irc account
it's all routed over Tor
it uses OTR

Cons:
you can't [afaik] disable OTR or allow it to be toggled so you will have to use another client for friends who don't use OTR

Hooplah, thanks for your post and I'm sorry if I wasn't clear in saying that you have a set up a separate user account, what I meant to say was that back in the day with Torchat you didn't have to use a messaging service from another provider, you could set one up from within the app and use that with your own unique .onion username. Good times.

As you say you need to use a service which supports OTR. My SO and I use otr.im which thanks to an elegant Prosody plugin requires OTR on the server anyway, gives you a bit of peace of mind!

Sadly Facebook no longer supports XMPP. I have heard anecdotal accounts of people getting it working but no joy. Still I suppose someone could just connect to Facebook's onion address via the Tor browser and message that way!

As for Google it seems it is still possible to get it working over 3rd party messengers but once again as you say you'd both have to support OTR.

Khannie

I use Pidgin with OTR over google chat. I haven't done enough reading on this, so would the main benefit for me there be the metadata wouldn't be accessible? Is it all kept within the Tor network, like?

anvilfour

Khannie wrote: »

I use Pidgin with OTR over google chat. I haven't done enough reading on this, so would the main benefit for me there be the metadata wouldn't be accessible? Is it all kept within the Tor network, like?

Hi Khannie,

You have it in one, I think the only benefit in addition to what you already have is that your location would be masked along with the fact you're having a conversation to begin with - when you compare and contrast with Torchat which didn't rely on any 3rd party messaging service I'm just not convinced this'll be much use, particularly when TAILS already has Pidgin installed.