One can just start a chat server, share the link via some disposable way, and then wait for the other people to join while maintaining anonymity.īecause it's an onion service, there is no way for an attacker to eavesdrop on the messages. Hence, people chatting can stay anonymous, and everything happens inside the tor network. Also, adding to the anonymity feature, OnionShare chat doesn't need any form of signing in. Given that the OnionShare chat feature works over the onion network, so it also has the additional anonymity feature. OnionShare chat rooms don’t store any messages anywhere, so the problem is reduced to a minimum.

Even if disappearing messages is turned on it’s hard to confirm all copies of the messages are actually deleted from all devices, and from any other places (like notifications databases) they may have been saved to. If, for example, you send a message to a Signal group, a copy of your message ends up on each device (the devices, and computers if they set up Signal Desktop of each member of the group). Hence, it leaves much less trace compared to other chat applications.Ī good example of the above as mentioned by Micah in his blog is: So once the chat server is closed, and the Tor Browser tab with the chat client is closed, there is no data (or metadata) related to chat that remains, even in the person's system who started the server. The chat server stores no information at all (not even the usernames of people chatting). There is no form of storage whatsoever in OnionShare chat mode. Why do we need an anonymous chat?Ī common question that we got during developing this feature is what's the use of an anonymous chat room since we already have end-to-end encrypted messaging apps. Let's dive in a little deeper into the feature.

So if you want to start a chat service, you just start the chat server, share the onion address of the server with people you want to chat with, everyone opens this onion address in Tor Browser and voila! You have an anonymous chat. Just like the other modes (share, receive, and website), there is now a chat mode. One of the main new features that I helped build was the anonymous chat feature in OnionShare. So the new OnionShare is out and it has a bunch of exciting new features and some improvements in the UI/UX designs of the tool.

Onionshare encryption