SoylentNews

Tor Building an Anonymous Instant Messenger Tool

posted by Dopefish on Sunday March 02 2014, @04:00PM   
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."

• Careful with the word choice Careful with the word choice (Score: 4, Insightful) by DarkMorph on Sunday March 02 2014, @04:13PM

  by DarkMorph (674) on Sunday March 02 2014, @04:13PM (#9637)

  Unless I missed something, this is about protecting anonymity, which means it helps disguise who you are. This has nothing to do with disguising what's being said. The infamous dilemma to find an encryption scheme to solve the other half of this problem strikes again...
  
  This reminds me of the idea, "How do you reveal a secret without telling the wrong person? Tell everyone at once." Between the two it's probably better to have the message in the clear but the author remains unknown.

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+2
  Insightful=2, Total=2
  Extra 'Insightful' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		4

• Re:Careful with the word choice Re:Careful with the word choice (Score: 1) by e on Sunday March 02 2014, @05:19PM

  by e (2923) on Sunday March 02 2014, @05:19PM (#9666)

  Huh? It's both anonymous and private, since it uses both Tor and OTR.

  Parent

  • Re:Careful with the word choice (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Sunday March 02 2014, @10:41PM

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday March 02 2014, @10:41PM (#9793) Journal

    Slightly dated article on this explains the degree to which the NSA has managed to penetrate TOR.

    http://www.informationweek.com/traffic-management/ nsa-battles-tor-9-facts/d/d-id/1111857 [informationweek.com]?

    A Fag is here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/ 2013/10/04/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-n sa-and-tor-in-one-faq/ [washingtonpost.com]

    Synopsis: NSA has de-anonymize a very few tor users, but left unsaid is how much traffic they can decrypt even if they don't know who the user is. Bruce Schneier thinks they haven't broken the encryption yet.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.

    Parent