Tor Messenger

» see trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorMessenger as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

tor messenger came out in 2015. i was 31, on linux at work most days, a computer engineer who paid some attention to privacy tooling and somehow still missed it. it never showed up in my chat life. by 2015 the chat life had already moved to whatsapp and slack for everyone i talked to, and a separate dedicated tor client for chat was a tool for a smaller audience than the one i was in.

the tor project announced the first public beta on 29 october 2015. the build was an instantbird fork. instantbird was a mozilla-community chat client, multi-protocol, talking to xmpp and irc and google talk and facebook chat over their respective transports. tor messenger took that codebase, wrapped every connection in tor, and turned on off-the-record messaging by default for end-to-end encryption. the pitch was straightforward. private chat by default, with the protocols you already used.

the project shipped eleven beta releases between 2015 and 2018. it never reached a stable 1.0. on 2 april 2018 the tor project posted a sunset announcement and stopped. three reasons were given. instantbird itself was no longer being developed, with its chat features being ported into thunderbird instead. the centralized client-server architecture of services like xmpp leaked metadata even when message content was encrypted. and the tor project did not have the resources to commission the external security audit a stable release would require.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

the metadata problem was the deepest one. tor messenger could hide what you said. it could not always hide who you were talking to and when, because the underlying chat protocols leaked that to whichever server was relaying the conversation. for a secure-by-default client built by the tor project specifically, shipping a stable release with a known metadata leak on the box was a credibility risk. the project would rather not ship than ship that, which is the correct call and also the kind of call that kills a project.

~ the next chapter ~

signal had already eaten the consumer end of the secure-chat category by 2018, with end-to-end encryption that worked on a phone and did not require running a tor circuit. for the dedicated-tor crowd, the recommendation rotated to ricochet-style onion services and to xmpp clients you configured yourself with otr or omemo. tor messenger had been the friendly version of that, the one with a download button and a default. when it stopped, no friendly version replaced it. the friendly version of secure chat ended up being signal, and signal is not on tor.

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