Cryptocat, Now with Encrypted Facebook Chat

Cryptocat’s mission is to make encrypted chat accessible and easy to use. With Cryptocat celebrating its third birthday (already!), we’re happy to announce the new Encrypted Facebook Chat feature in the latest Cryptocat 2.2 update.

Facebook Chat as a Cryptocat Buddy List

Cryptocat can now log into your Facebook account for you, fetch your Facebook contacts, and if another contact is also using Cryptocat, you’ll be able to automatically set up an end-to-end encrypted chat. If a Facebook friend later logs in via Cryptocat, your chat will be immediately upgraded to an encrypted Cryptocat chat:

If both you and your Facebook friend use Cryptocat, your chats will be OTR-encrypted end-to-end and can’t be viewed by Facebook (or Cryptocat’s network.) This is how your chat will look like on Facebook:

Effectively, what Cryptocat is doing is benefitting from your Facebook Chat contact list as a readily available buddy list. As a compliment to Cryptocat’s ephemeral group chat feature, Encrypted Facebook Chat lets you view which of your friends are online and allows you to immediately set up encrypted chat with them.

Users will still be able chat with non-Cryptocat users from within Cryptocat — although those conversations will not be encrypted (and you should probably ask your friends to upgrade to Cryptocat too, wink wink.)