AnonTechie writes "The Tor Foundation is moving forward with a plan to provide its own instant messaging service called the Tor Instant Messaging Bundle". The tool will allow people to communicate in real time while preserving anonymity by using chat servers concealed within Tor's hidden network. In planning since last July as news of the National Security Agency's broad surveillance of instant messaging traffic emerged the Tor Instant Messaging Bundle (TIMB) should be available in experimental builds by the end of March, based on a roadmap published in conjunction with the Tor Project's Winter Dev meeting in Iceland.
TIMB will connect to instant messaging servers configured as Tor "hidden services" as well as to commercial IM services on the open Internet."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 02 2014, @06:02PM
Servers can be compromised. In this case, without OTR initially the cleartext of your messages will be sentto unknown servers. Not a good design!
The community needs a design that keeps both the data (your messages) and metadata (your identity) a secret.
(Score: 1) by _NSAKEY on Monday March 03 2014, @10:48PM
They're bundling OTR with it, and anyone who is talking about anything worth hiding from prying eyes is going to assume that the servers are compromised anyway. If the origin of the messages from both parties is anonymized (This includes not recycling the same username), and the messages themselves are encrypted, then it can be argued that it doesn't matter as long as the OTR keys are properly verified.
Unless there's a backdoor in OTR...