Ricochet is an anonymous peer-to-peer instant messaging application. Ricochet lets people chat directly with each other over Tor. Unlike other chat services, no intermediate servers are required. This means that Ricochet does not store your contact lists and chat histories on a server somewhere in the cloud.
Ricochet is built on top of Tor hidden services. Tor hidden services provide anonymity and end-to-end encryption. This enables people to have conversations that are private and secure.
What is a Tor hidden service?
Tor hidden services provides a means of hosting services on the Tor network. Any type of network service may be hosted as a hidden service (such as web servers, file shares, and instant messaging servers).
Instead of using an IP address or domain name, Tor hidden services are accessed by their .onion address. The .onion address is an automatically generated name that is derived from the public key of the hidden service.
.onion addresses are only accessible over Tor. Tor Browser is one way to access .onion addresses. In Subgraph OS, any application can access .onion addresses because all applications are routed through Tor.
Tor hidden services provide privacy and anonymity for both the server and the client. Tor hidden services have the following benefits over regular network services:
- Neither the client nor the server need to know the network location (IP address) of each other. Tor routes traffic through a series of rendezvous points that hide the client IP address from the server. The server's network location (IP address) is also hidden from the client, who connects to the .onion address of the server.
- All traffic between the client and server is end-to-end encrypted. Traffic never leaves the Tor network, meaning that it is only decrypted on either end of the transaction. When Tor is used to connect to the regular Internet, traffic is only encrypted until the exit-node. Without using another layer of encryption such as HTTPS, exit nodes can observe traffic. Tor hidden services are not affected by this limitation.
More information about the hidden services protocol can be found here:
In Ricochet, each user has a contact ID that maps to a Tor hidden service that is hosted on their computer. The application manages all of the plumbing of creating the hidden service on your computer and communicating with your contacts via their hidden services.
More information about Ricochet can be found on the following pages:
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Ricochet is similar to other instant messaging clients. The application shows the contacts that are online. You can open chat sessions with your contacts and switch between those sessions like in any other instant messager.
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If you know the contact ID of another user, you can add them as a contact. To add a contact, click the + button in the top-left corner of the application window.
Ricochet contact options
ID: The contact ID of the contact you want to add
Name: A nickname for the contact you want to add
Message: The message you want to send when adding the contact
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