TorChat – Encrypted and anonymous instant messaging and file transfer

TorChat is one of those things that we all really love and need to put more effort into developing, maintaining and using.

TorChat is an instant messaging client that lets you also send files to others and it does all of this over the Tor network. The Tor network is an anonymous routing network that is very robust and heavily used by people from all over the world to bypass censorship and surveillance by either their ISP, employer, family, community or even government. This anonymity is achieved by routing your connections through other Tor users who have opted-in to operate a Tor network node.

Tor lets you access the internet through it’s network but it also allows you to connect to resources that are only available on it’s network. These things are called Hidden Services. Since they are only accessible to people who are connecting to the Tor network you will have a connection that is encrypted end to end and is still anonymous.

This makes TorChat the best anonymous and encrypted instant messaging client out there. Please understand that the Tor network was never meant to handle heavy loads such as file transfers or bittorrent and can be very slow at times.