Table of Contents
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Tox Compared With Other IM software
DeCentralized
richochet
Always uses Tor, rather than Tox, where Tor can be used at will.
- https://richochet.im https: certificate expired over a year ago, and latest version in 2016.
- https://github.com/ricochet-im/ricochet last updated 2017.
Relaunched as https://github.com/blueprint-freespeech/ricochet-refresh
- no group chat
- can't use system Tor - only its own
- didn't see any mobile apps
- Had a vulnerability with HTML in invites
briar
Features:
- Peer-to-peer encrypted messaging and forums
- Messages are stored securely on your device, not in the cloud
- Connect directly with nearby contacts - no Internet access required
- written in Java
- Uses Tor.
- has an Android app and desktop (the app is more featured than the desktop)
- No support for Windows and macOS
- chats and groupchats
- Well documented
- Externally Audited: "the quality and readability of the app’s source code was rather exceptional"
- USGov funded: Open Technology Fund/U.S. Agency for Global Media/Radio Free Asia
- The apps are betas that expire in 90 days: "For security reasons, their accounts and data will expire with the beta."
ZeroNet
- Abandonned by its creator, it is being carried on by a number of non-cooperating forks.
- A known RCE vulnerability is in some of the forks, but the developers of the patched forks have not filed a CVE.
- None of the current developers have write access to the main web site, which distributes code with the CVE.
Centralized
Centralized systems make it easy to MITM the E2E crypto, so unless they are open source, they can't be trustworthy.
It is much harder to Tox over Tor than to block services like WhatsApp which relay on centralized servers.
Signal
Signal not only uses Amazon Web Services servers but also Microsoft and Google servers, and now to make things even more toxic they are also using Cloudflare which makes in unusable with Tor.
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