Hi,
Tor Messenger is an instant messaging client currently under development. It is designed to make connections using the Tor network and will therefore be a valuable piece in the privacy-enhancing software toolkit (web: Tor Browser, email: Thunderbird + TorBirdy, chat: Tor Messenger.)
Based on the Instantbird IM client [0], Tor Messenger:
- sends all traffic over Tor, - uses Off-the-Record (OTR) encryption [1] of conversations by default, - can be used with a wide variety of chat networks, - has an easy-to-use graphical user interface localized into multiple languages.
Some more information about Tor Messenger (and why we picked Instantbird) can be found on the wiki [2].
Current Status
We have Tor Messenger bundles for Linux (32-bit and 64-bit) with OTR (using ctypes-otr [4]) and Tor support (Tor binary and Tor Launcher included), among other privacy settings. We are doing automated builds of Tor Messenger using rbm [5] (thanks to Nicolas Vigier).
@@@ WARNING: NOT READY FOR PUBLIC USE. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE. @@@
Bundles
Linux (32-bit) https://people.torproject.org/~sukhbir/tor-messenger-0.0.4/tor-messenger-0.0...
Linux (64-bit) https://people.torproject.org/~sukhbir/tor-messenger-0.0.4/tor-messenger-0.0...
sha256sum https://people.torproject.org/~sukhbir/tor-messenger-0.0.4/sha256sums.txt https://people.torproject.org/~sukhbir/tor-messenger-0.0.4/sha256sums.txt.as...
The bundles are signed with my key (Sukhbir Singh; 0xB297B391).
Extract the bundles and then run: ./start-tor-messenger.
This is an early release and there may be serious privacy leaks and other issues -- please DO NOT recommend Tor Messenger to end users; this release is only for developers and advanced users who would like to help us with testing but understand the risks involved with using alpha software. Do not ignore this warning.
We will try to have a monthly release cycle leading up to a stable release by July 2015.
@@@ WARNING: NOT READY FOR PUBLIC USE. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE. @@@
Feedback
With this release, we invite feedback not limited to anonymity leaks, usability issues, feature requests and suggestions for improvement. Please submit your feedback using the bug tracker [3] (select the "Tor Messenger" component). You can also talk to us on this mailing list or on IRC.
(No seriously, don't use the bundles for any serious communication yet.)
[0] - http://instantbird.com/ [1] - https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/ [2] - https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorMessenger [3] - https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/newticket [4] - https://github.com/arlolra/ctypes-otr [5] - http://rbm.boklm.eu/
Thanks,
Arlo Breault and Sukhbir Singh