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Tor Building an Anonymous Instant Messenger Tool

posted by Dopefish on Sunday March 02 2014, @12:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the hide-away dept.

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."

 
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  • (Score: 1) by NovelUserName on Sunday March 02 2014, @07:18PM

    by NovelUserName (768) on Sunday March 02 2014, @07:18PM (#9816)

    My understanding is that the middleman problem is to deal with the non-static IP problem. If every user has a static IP, then great, you can connect directly, otherwise you will need some method of identifying the current ip of the person you want to talk to. The traditional solution is to have both parties connect to a server, which then assigns connections based on their login credentials. I suppose you could have the server just pass the correct IP to each party, thus facilitating a direct connection, however, a record of the communication still exists. I suppose you could have each party periodically download a full list of the current IP addresses known to the server, thus obscuring the specific connection made to everyone except the ISP. This, however, seems data intensive, and since most people care more about their bandwidth cap than privacy, you and I aren't going to get a solution like that.

  • (Score: 1) by monster on Monday March 03 2014, @05:06AM

    by monster (1260) on Monday March 03 2014, @05:06AM (#9956) Journal

    That is precisely what DNS is for. Too bad so many PCs on dynamic IP connections are infected with SPAM-sending trojans that most big email providers require also inverse DNS to accept email from those IPs, which is a lot harder to get (you need to convince your ISP to set it for you, and update it whenever your IP changes).