Pierluigi Paganini October 30, 2015

Tor Messenger integrates the “Off-the-Record” (OTR) Messaging that allows private conversations over instant messaging by encrypting messages and then routing them over the Tor network. The mechanism is similar to the one adopted to protect user Internet activities, the traffic is routed through the TorNetwork making impossible to intercept it.

The experts at Tor Project explained that that have considered a number of messaging clients for inspiration during the design phase, including Pidgin, Adam Langley’s xmpp-client, and Instantbird.

“Instantbird was the pragmatic choice — its transport protocols are written in a memory-safe language (JavaScript); it has a graphical user interface and already supports many natural languages; and it’s a XUL application, which means we can leverage both the code (Tor Launcher) and in-house expertise that the Tor Project has developed working on Tor Browser with Firefox. It also has an active and vibrant software developer community that has been very responsive and understanding of our needs. The main feature it lacked was OTR support, which we have implemented and hope to upstream to the main Instantbird repository for the benefit of all Instantbird (and Thunderbird) users.” continues the post.