Tor has released a beta of the protected messenger

The developers of Tor have presented a beta version of their messenger with message encryption. The announcement of this appeared on October 29 in the official blog of the project. The new messenger combines the use of the Tor network to ensure anonymity and the OTR protocol (off the record) - for encryption.

Tor Messenger supports various transport networks for messages, including: Jabber (XMPP), IRC, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, Twitter, Yahoo, and others. The basis of the program is Instantbird - messenger from the developers of Mozilla. Three people from Tor have been developing the messenger for more than a year.
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The OTR protocol provides both message encryption and identification — that is, confirmation of the fact that no one else impersonates the person with whom you want to communicate. Loss of encryption keys does not compromise your previous conversations.

In addition, one of the interesting features of OTR is the impossibility of tying you to a specific conversation. Conversations do not have a digital signature - and although during a conversation you are sure that you are communicating with the right person, anyone can create a set of messages that will look like messages between any two users of the program. And if so, then it is impossible to prove that you were the one who led the particular conversation.

The developers of Tor Messenger have added OTR support to Instantbird and made it so that by default, message encryption is required, but your activity log is not kept and the message archive is not stored. Also, the messenger can import contacts from your other similar programs.

Unfortunately, the messenger simply didn’t start up on my 32-bit Windows 7 - the beta status affects. Other journalists managed to test its performance - the client is also available for Linux and Mac OS.

Alternatives to the Tor Messenger, of course, exist. These are Pond (developed by one person), Ricochet , Telegram (a proprietary messenger from the founders of VKontakte) and Tox (a distributed messenger that has been in development for a long time).

Update : after the news became widely known, and users began to complain about the problem of launching the client under Windows, the developers released an updated version that really successfully runs and runs.