How to Create an Encrypted Chat Room
If you are looking to set up an encrypted chat room immediately without writing any code, you can use Hush Private Rooms. Hush provides a ready-to-use, web-based temporary room designed for secure, short-lived exchanges. This guide explains how to use our hosted application; it is not a programming tutorial for building an encrypted chat application or script from source code.
Why You Might Need a Temporary Chat Room
When collaborating on sensitive tasks—like debugging a production incident or coordinating a brief, confidential exchange—you may need a way to communicate without leaving a lasting record in your team's standard communication tools. Sending sensitive configuration strings or temporary tokens via Slack or email means those messages sit in a searchable history indefinitely.
A temporary, end-to-end encrypted chat room provides a straightforward solution: a dedicated space for short-lived sensitive text without durable chat history.
Step-by-Step: Creating and Using Your Room
Follow these steps to securely exchange information in real time:
- Create the room: Navigate to the Private Rooms (Beta) page and click Create Room to generate a unique, end-to-end encrypted session.
- Share the room link: Send the generated link to your intended recipient through an Out-of-Band (OOB) channel.
- Second participant joins: The recipient clicks the link to enter the room.
- Communicate while both are online: You can immediately begin exchanging text messages, provided both participants remain online and connected to the room.
- Room expires after 15 minutes: The room becomes unavailable automatically 15 minutes after creation.
Product Limits and Security Boundaries
Before using Private Rooms, it is essential to understand exactly what the tool does and what it does not do. We believe in being fully transparent about our security model:
- Exactly two participants: The room strictly supports only you and one other person.
- Both must be online: There is no offline message delivery or queuing. If a participant is disconnected, they will not receive messages sent during that time.
- Text only: The chat only supports plain text. No media, files, or attachments can be sent.
- Rooms expire after 15 minutes: Every room self-destructs automatically 15 minutes after creation, terminating the connection.
- No durable message history: Refreshing your browser clears the local chat history.
- Link possession is not identity verification: Anyone with the room link can join if the second slot is open. You must independently verify who you are talking to.
- Screenshots and compromised devices: The intended recipient can always take a screenshot. Additionally, malware on either participant's device can capture data before encryption or after decryption. These threats are strictly outside the product's protection scope.
Hush Private Rooms are a transmission tool, not a zero-trust panacea. We do not claim absolute anonymity, nor can we protect against compromised endpoints.
For more details on our security approach, review our Security and Privacy documentation.