A standalone, forward-secret, metadataless chat application is a useful thing in today's world. I've created one using the pyaxo Axolotl library. The axolotl protocol provides the forward secrecy, and tor eliminates the metadata.

The client is based on a client-server model, where one party to the chat establishes a server, and the other party connects to the server as a client. The interesting thing about this application is that the connection is made through tor. The server creates a hidden service, and the client connects to that hidden service, so all communication is hidden (even from the tor exit nodes).

The client is terminal-based, and uses ncurses. axotor.py can be found in the examples subdirectory of the pyaxo github repo. pyaxo is available in the python package manager and can be installed via pip. When pyaxo is installed via pip, axotor.py is located in the /usr/share/pyaxo/examples directory.

Here are a couple of images of the startup process:

Here are the resulting chat windows: