Tor has just announced the release of the beta version of Tor Messenger, a chat client based on the Tor network that promises anonymous and unrecorded chat.
The Tor team has been working on this application for some time, having so far released three experimental versions of the client for internal testing.
Today marks the first beta release of Tor Messenger.
Tor's IM client was not created from scratch but is based on Mozilla's Instantbird client, which is built on XUL - a technology also incorporated into Firefox.
The new beta version of the messenger allows users to exchange messages securely over the internet, routing all traffic through the Tor network.
The client currently features support for OTR (Off-The-Record) messages, multilingual interface, and support for Jabber (XMPP), IRC, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, Twitter, and Yahoo.
Although the new client is based on Tor, allowing the exchange of messages through anonymous Internet relays and masking the location of the people participating in the chat, there are some significant disadvantages as well.
The biggest of these is the classic client-server communication model that allows Tor Messenger servers to store conversation metadata. In order to ensure true anonymity, the Tor team recommends that server admins implement solutions, such as Pond or Ricochet, to address this issue.
The developers' plans for future versions of Tor Messenger include support for automatic updates, sandboxing (for greater security), better support for Tor protocols, OTR for Twitter DMS, secure communication between multiple members (np1sec), and encrypted file transfer.
