TerminalPhone: Encrypted Voice Calls Over Tor in One Bash Script

A single Bash script runs anonymous, end-to-end encrypted voice calls over Tor hidden services, with 21 selectable ciphers and a relay mode that forwards group audio without being able to decrypt it.
cyber-security
software-engineering
Author

Kabui, Charles

Published

2026-06-01

Keywords

tor-hidden-services, end-to-end-encryption, anonymous-voice-calls, push-to-talk, bash-script

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TerminalPhone is a single Bash script that runs encrypted, anonymous voice calls over Tor hidden services. No accounts, no phone numbers, no server to register with. Your .onion address is your identity. The model is walkie-talkie: hold space to record, release to send. Audio is compressed at 16kbps using the Opus codec, encrypted by default with AES-256-CBC, base64-encoded, and pushed through Tor to the other party. A 10-second clip lands under 20KB on the wire. You can pick from 21 ciphers ranked by strength, swap them mid-call, and exclude specific countries (Five Eyes presets included) from your Tor circuit. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Android via Termux.

Existing private call tools either depend on company-run servers and phone numbers like Signal, or ship as full apps you install and maintain. TerminalPhone is one file you can read in an afternoon and run from a terminal on a Pixel phone, a laptop, or a Raspberry Pi. For a journalist meeting a source, or an activist in a country that fingerprints VoIP traffic, the trust surface collapses to a shared secret and the Tor network. Optional Snowflake bridges keep it working where Tor itself is blocked.

The relay mode is the more interesting piece. A volunteer can host a zero-knowledge group bridge that forwards encrypted audio to N callers without ever holding the shared secret, so the operator literally cannot decrypt what passes through. Group calls without a trusted middleman, in a single Bash script.

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GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE v3.0(View License)

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@misc{kabui2026,
  author = {{Kabui, Charles}},
  title = {TerminalPhone: {Encrypted} {Voice} {Calls} {Over} {Tor} in
    {One} {Bash} {Script}},
  date = {2026-06-01},
  url = {https://toknow.ai/posts/terminalphone-encrypted-voice-calls-tor-bash-script/},
  langid = {en-GB}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Kabui, Charles. 2026. “TerminalPhone: Encrypted Voice Calls Over Tor in One Bash Script.” https://toknow.ai/posts/terminalphone-encrypted-voice-calls-tor-bash-script/.