The Tor Foundation is busy building an instant messaging tool that will allow users to communicate in real time while also keep their chat hidden from prying eyes by using Tor’s anonymity network.
Dubbed Tor Instant Messaging Bundle (TIMB) the tool will use Instantbird as its basis and force all instant messaging traffic through Tor regardless of whether the server is located within Tor or is one belonging to the external messaging service providers.
The Foundation has been busy planning TIMB since July last year following emergence of news about NSA surveillance of instant messaging traffic. Those looking to try out TIMB should be able to get their hands onto an experimental build as early as March this year itself – probably on March 31, 2014.
The initial experimental builds won’t support ‘off the record’ (OTR) feature – something that encrypts the messages even further and requires digital signature exchange for verification of parties involved in a chat session. However, the Foundation expects to bring in the OTR feature soon once the back-end part of the feature is ready.
The developers have decided to use Instantbird because they were not sure whether Pidgin or libpurple developers were too keen on security. Further developers were also concerned about the amount of efforts required to audit and maintain the library.
From the roadmap it is evident that the developers do not want any dependency on the libpurple library even though it is part of Instandbird. The team will be working to remove libpurple as dependency from Instantbird and remove it from TIMB builds as well.
