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Are there any app that uses the Tor network and existing hidden protocols to provide anonymous chat? This could be an alternative to some of the instant messag

by Renaud 3y ago

Are there any app that uses the Tor network and existing hidden protocols to provide anonymous chat? This could be an alternative to some of the instant messaging systems that provide privacy but not anonymity. I know that some chat messaging systems can use Tor as the transport, but they have problems of their own. What I'm thinking about is something along the lines that each user app hosts a hidden service that receives messages through a standard HTTP API. Users need to hand their hidden service address to friends. The protocol itself already handles payload encryption and routing but messages could be further encrypted at the app level before being sent (using the other user's public key once an initial exchange has been done). Granted, sending a message would require all parties to be online at the same time, but there could be a set of relay servers to hold messages until they get fetched. I'm sure there are lots of hairy issues to take into account, but I would expect the existing protocol to mitigate some of these compared to a ground-up approach (like Session is doing). Tor is fairly mature and, despite all attacks on its infrastructure and protocol, it is still standing. I'm also wondering if such a messaging system couldn't be useful for some IoT types of scenarios, as it would protect the location and communication of the source of the data, so the devices could not be easily physically found and hacked. None of this would be useful for high-bandwidth real-time data, but you can get reasonable latencies and traffic sent this way. Maybe it's all just a dumb idea...

mikece 3y ago
There is Session which combines TOR message routing with a message encryption scheme which is inspired by Signal. Is that what you mean?
dabber21 3y ago
there was a project https://blog.torproject.org/tor-messenger-beta-chat-over-tor-easily/ https://blog.torproject.org/tor-messenger-beta-chat-over-tor... but I don't know what the status is, quick google searches make it seem abandoned
- holmesworcester 3y ago
  Yeah. Also there's Ricochet and its continuation Ricochet Refresh, but these only do 1:1 messaging AFAIK.[1][2] Ricochet was a big inspiration for my project Quiet.[3] Cwtch also deserves a mention, though it depends on ephemeral servers and isn't fully p2p. Briar is another and frequently comes up on HN. [4][5] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(software) 2. https://www.ricochetrefresh.net/ https://www.ricochetrefresh.net/ 3. https://tryquiet.org/ https://tryquiet.org/ 4. https://cwtch.im/ https://cwtch.im/ 5. https://briarproject.org/ https://briarproject.org/
holmesworcester 3y ago
My team is building Quiet, an alternative to team chat apps like Slack and Discord that works as you describe: https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/#readme https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/#readme > Granted, sending a message would require all parties to be online at the same time, but there could be a set of relay servers to hold messages until they get fetched. We actually do a bit better than this! We use a gossip network (libp2p gossipsub) so all peers don't have to connect directly, and a CRDT over a private IPFS network so that everyone in a community eventually syncs all messages. As long as there's a continuity of online peers, the availability of messages is the same as a central server, and with a few Android users in the mix it's pretty easy to get to that level of continuity. (The battery impact of staying connected all the time on Android isn't as bad as you'd think, and we haven't even begun to optimize it.) And yes, it builds on the maturity of Tor rather than trying to roll its own onion routing layer as Session is doing. Quiet is still a work in progress, but we've been dogfooding the desktop app for over a yearn now as our main team chat, and the Android app for a little less than that. We're working on iOS now, which is... tricky. But we're hopeful.
- Renaud 3y ago
  That's really interesting and I hope the project gets continued support.

by Renaud 3y ago

mikece 3y ago

There is Session which combines TOR message routing with a message encryption scheme which is inspired by Signal. Is that what you mean?

dabber21 3y ago

there was a project https://blog.torproject.org/tor-messenger-beta-chat-over-tor-easily/ https://blog.torproject.org/tor-messenger-beta-chat-over-tor... but I don't know what the status is, quick google searches make it seem abandoned

holmesworcester 3y ago
Yeah. Also there's Ricochet and its continuation Ricochet Refresh, but these only do 1:1 messaging AFAIK.[1][2] Ricochet was a big inspiration for my project Quiet.[3] Cwtch also deserves a mention, though it depends on ephemeral servers and isn't fully p2p. Briar is another and frequently comes up on HN. [4][5] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricochet_(software) 2. https://www.ricochetrefresh.net/ https://www.ricochetrefresh.net/ 3. https://tryquiet.org/ https://tryquiet.org/ 4. https://cwtch.im/ https://cwtch.im/ 5. https://briarproject.org/ https://briarproject.org/

holmesworcester 3y ago

My team is building Quiet, an alternative to team chat apps like Slack and Discord that works as you describe: https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/#readme https://github.com/TryQuiet/quiet/#readme > Granted, sending a message would require all parties to be online at the same time, but there could be a set of relay servers to hold messages until they get fetched. We actually do a bit better than this! We use a gossip network (libp2p gossipsub) so all peers don't have to connect directly, and a CRDT over a private IPFS network so that everyone in a community eventually syncs all messages. As long as there's a continuity of online peers, the availability of messages is the same as a central server, and with a few Android users in the mix it's pretty easy to get to that level of continuity. (The battery impact of staying connected all the time on Android isn't as bad as you'd think, and we haven't even begun to optimize it.) And yes, it builds on the maturity of Tor rather than trying to roll its own onion routing layer as Session is doing. Quiet is still a work in progress, but we've been dogfooding the desktop app for over a yearn now as our main team chat, and the Android app for a little less than that. We're working on iOS now, which is... tricky. But we're hopeful.

Renaud 3y ago
That's really interesting and I hope the project gets continued support.