Ricochet Refresh — Anonymous Messaging over Tor

When you start Ricochet Refresh, it creates a Tor hidden service on your device. Your Ricochet ID is your .onion address — something like ricochet:rs7ce36jsj24ogfw. When someone contacts you, their Ricochet client connects to your hidden service through the Tor network. Messages travel directly between the two hidden services with no intermediate server.

This design provides exceptional metadata protection. No server logs your IP address, your contact list, your online/offline status, or the timing of your messages. Even if an adversary could monitor the entire Tor network, they would only see encrypted traffic between two hidden services with no way to determine the content or the identities of the participants.

Ricochet Refresh is the actively maintained fork of the original Ricochet project. It uses the latest Tor onion service protocol (v3) with longer, more secure .onion addresses and updated cryptographic primitives. The project is open source and available on GitHub for security auditing.

Ricochet Refresh is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Download it from the official GitHub releases page. On Linux, the AppImage format makes installation straightforward — download, make executable with chmod +x, and run. No system-wide installation or root access required.

On first launch, Ricochet creates your identity and Tor hidden service automatically. Share your Ricochet ID with your contacts through a secure channel. To add a contact, click Add Contact and enter their Ricochet ID. A contact request is sent through Tor, and once accepted, you can exchange messages directly.

Ricochet supports text messaging only — no file transfers, voice calls, or group chats. This minimalism is intentional: every feature added is a potential attack surface. For file sharing, use OnionShare alongside Ricochet. For group communication, consider Briar.

Ricochet provides forward secrecy: compromising a long-term key does not allow decryption of past messages. Each conversation uses ephemeral keys that are destroyed when the conversation ends. Messages are not stored persistently — when you close Ricochet, your message history is gone.

The Tor hidden service model means neither party reveals their IP address to the other, or to any server. There is no DNS lookup, no TLS certificate, and no server infrastructure that could be subpoenaed or compromised. The only way to associate a Ricochet ID with a person is to compromise their device directly.

Ricochet's main limitation is that both parties must be online simultaneously to exchange messages. There is no offline message queuing. This is a direct consequence of the serverless architecture — without a server to store messages, they can only be delivered in real time. Use Ricochet together with VPN and Tor for maximum anonymity.

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