Ricochet Refresh

Ricochet Refresh is a peer-to-peer instant messaging application that prioritizes user privacy and user control by design. The application and protocol are completely decentralized and do not depend on any third party infrastructure apart from the Tor network itself.

Ricochet Refresh works by creating a Tor onion service on your computer, which serves as your anonymous identity and endpoint on the network. When you communicate with a contact, a Tor circuit is established between your machines, routing data through multiple nodes so that no single node knows both the origin and destination — ensuring strong anonymity. All communications are end-to-end encrypted and so message contents are only visible to the parties in a conversation.

This architecture makes it particularly valuable for protecting freedom of expression among whistleblowers, activists and journalists worldwide who face surveillance risks. Ricochet Refresh also bundles the Tor Project's censorship-circumvention tools to enable connectivity even in constrained network environments.

Ricochet Refresh is free and open-source software. It is community-driven with volunteers invited and encouraged to contribute code, report bugs and suggest features via its GitHub repository.