Torchat Anyone Tried It?

Just found this today....

TorChat is a peer to peer instant messenger with a completely decentralized design, built on top of Tor's location hidden services, giving you extremely strong anonymity while being very easy to use without the need to install or configure anything.

TorChat just runs from an USB drive on any Windows PC. (It can run on Linux and Mac too, in fact it was developed on Linux with cross platform usability in mind from the very first moment on, but the installation on other platforms than Windows is a bit more complicated at the moment)

Tor location hidden services basically means:

* Nobody will be able to find out where you are.
* If they are already observing you and sniff your internet connection they will not be able to find out
o what you send or receive (everything is end-to-end encrypted)
o to whom you are sending or receiving from
o where your contacts are located

https://code.google.com/p/torchat/

 

Pidgin with OTR would be a safer bet for the moment, when you consider that Tor is really about being anonymous not private...

 

You can use any chat client that supports proxy to run in Tor ... I don't see any need for this Torchat atm.

 

All TorChat traffic is encrypted end-to-end.

 

another option is SILC

DasFox: Privacy on Tor is only an issue once you leave the network!

 

What is SILC?

And can you elaborate on that second statement a little? What issues are there "on Tor" that should concern you after you leave it?

 

caspian:
1)
The Secure Internet Live Conferencing protocol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SILC_(protocol)

2)
exit node eavesdropping of plain text traffic
sorry for the confusion

 

The communication then wouldn't be encrypted end-to-end. Torchat doesn't use regular Tor, but uses Tor's hidden services which makes both ends anonymous to each other and means the chat is encrypted end-to-end.

However, it's true that if you use "regular" Tor and then use OTR on top of that, then you'd probably get the same protection. But the nice thing about Torchat is you don't have to register a screename with a third party like you have to do with MSN, AIM, etc. On Torchat your SN is given to you automatically (it's a hash really), so there's no need to register with any third party.

 

I think Torchat looks pretty interesting. I may give it a try.

 

Y'all just got told. lol Back on topic, the program is very impressive. If only I had likeminded friends to use it with...

Blode.