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 or operators to compromise that could access your information
- It’s cross-platform and easy for non-technical users
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 (or the old 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. With that said, I believe it does more to try to protect your privacy than any similar software.
Downloads
Ricochet is available for Windows, OS X (10.7 or later) and as a generic Linux binary package.
This major release switches to a safer and more extensible protocol, adds a brand new icon and 11 new language translations and includes many UI fixes as well as security updates for Tor and OpenSSL.
Downloads:
Other downloads and PGP signatures are available at https://ricochet.im/releases/1.1.0/. As always, you can share any bugs, ideas and thoughts through GitHub or privately.
Important note about old versions
This version is not “backwards compatible” with contacts that run Ricochet 1.0.4 or older. Your contacts must also update in order to chat again. You will keep your existing address and contacts.
To get everyone updated quickly, people running an older version will see an automatic message one time from their updated contacts. We intend to keep compatibility in the future, and to not need to resort to this method again.
Visit the releases page for the latest version and changelog.
All releases and signatures are also available at https://ricochet.im/releases/.