Now there’s really no shortage of instant messaging services, apart from the ones built by third party developers, major vendors such as Apple, Google and BlackBerry have their own messaging services. However since last year when word of NSA’s clandestine spying operations broke, a lot of questions have been raised about the security provided by such services. It seems that the market could do with a service that was built around security, and Tor appears to be doing just that. Documents presented at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland reveal that the folks behind one of the world’s most popular anonymity service are now working on an anonymous instant messaging service.
Called Tor Instant Messaging Bundle, it will work with an existing messenger client called InstantBird. The developers have plans to bake encrypted off the record chatting in the client and then pair it up with the general Tor Launcher in the near future. Experimental builds are expected to be released by the end of this month.
Tor has also laid down plans to hire independent auditors who will assess the security of InstantBird as well as the Tor implementation. For now it is not known exactly when the final product will be ready, but we should get an early look at it in the coming weeks.
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