Tor Project releases beta version of its off-the-record messenger

Tor Project has released a first beta version of Tor Messenger. The chat program should make it easy to communicate securely and anonymously over the Tor network. The client is based on InstantBird and supports many popular chat protocols.

Tor Messenger supports chat protocols from Jabber, IRC, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, Twitter, and Yahoo, among others. The chat client automatically activates off-the-record messaging. In addition, all communication is provided with encryption and participants in a chat conversation know who they are communicating with thanks to authentication. Because all data is sent via the Tor network, the location of the participants in the chat cannot be traced.

In early 2014, the Tor Project announced the messaging client. The non-profit organization chose InstantBird as a basis, partly because the transport protocols are written in JavaScript, it has a graphical interface and because many software developers offer active support.

With the beta client, Tor Project wants to collect feedback on the usability and security of the application. Earlier, three alpha versions were made available to members of the mailing list. Tor Messenger Beta is available for Linux, Windows and OS X. However, the Windows variant doesn’t seem to work properly yet. The issue is known and an update is in the works.