siathalysedi / ricochet

Anonymous peer-to-peer instant messaging

Anonymous and serverless instant messaging that just works

Ricochet is an experiment with a different kind of instant messaging that doesn't trust anyone with your identity, your contact list, or your communications.

• You can chat without exposing your identity (or IP address) to anyone
• Nobody can discover who your contacts are or when you talk (metadata-free!)
• There are no servers to compromise or operators to intimidate for your information
• It's cross-platform and easy for non-technical users

Note: This project was recently renamed from Torsion. Some references may not yet be updated, and new releases are coming soon.

How it works

Ricochet is a peer-to-peer instant messaging system built on Tor hidden services. Your login is your hidden service address, and contacts connect to you (not an intermediate server) through Tor. The rendezvous system makes it extremely hard for anyone to learn your identity from your address.

Ricochet is not affiliated with or endorsed by The Tor Project.

For more information, you can read about Tor and learn about Ricochet's design or protocol. Everything is open-source and open to contribution.

Experimental

This software is an experiment. It hasn't been audited or formally reviewed by anyone. Security and anonymity are difficult topics, and you should carefully evaluate your risks and exposure with any software. Do not rely on Ricochet for your safety unless you have more trust in my work than it deserves. That said, I believe it does more to try to protect your privacy than any similar software.

Downloading & Building

Build requirements

• Qt 5.1 or later (see Linux notes below)
• OpenSSL
• A pre-built Tor binary and its dependencies

Place tor or tor.exe in your build directory or PATH. To build packages, see the scripts under the packaging directory.

Linux

Users of Ubuntu 14.04 or earlier and other slow distributions will need to use the Qt SDK or build their own Qt.

Run qmake or qmake-qt5, then make. The default build portable, which will store configuration in a folder named config next to the binary. For a system installation using XDG configuration directories, run qmake DEFINES+=RICOCHET_NO_PORTABLE instead.

OS X

Use the Qt SDK or homebrew. Run qmake and make to build an application bundle. The default build will store configuration in a config.ricochet folder next to the application unless the path looks like a system-wide Applications folder, in which case ~/Library/Application Support/Ricochet is used.

Windows

Builds with MinGW or MSVC. You will need the Qt SDK and a copy of OpenSSL headers and libraries.

You must pass OPENSSLDIR="C:\Path\To\OpenSSL\Build" to qmake. If using Qt Creator, add it to Additional arguments in the Projects/Build Settings tab. The default build is portable and stores configuration in a config folder next to the binary. Pass DEFINES+=RICOCHET_NO_PORTABLE to qmake to use the user appdata location instead.

Other

Bugs can be reported on the issue tracker. Translations can be contributed on Transifex.

You can contact me with ricochet:rs7ce36jsj24ogfw or [email protected] (PGP 183C045D).

You should support The Tor Project, The Internet Defense League, EFF, and run a Tor relay.