[OTR-dev] OTR-dev Digest, Vol 16, Issue 2

[Ian Goldberg]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 10:24:10PM -0700, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> On 2/12/10 9:31 PM, Patrick Tierney wrote:
> 
> > We weren't targeting it at IM in particular. Considering that Perl has
> > modules to handle all sorts of data, the plugin could expand OTR to
> > secure many new types of communication (file exchange, voice, video).
> 
> Sounds intriguing. I'd be curious to hear how you propose to do that. My
> understanding of OTR has always been that it is designed to exchange
> basic text messages and perhaps XHTML-formatted versions of those
> messages, but not the kind of extended data that is necessary to
> negotiate multimedia sessions and not the data itself (which might be
> transferred via direct TCP streams, UDP associations, media relays, and
> the like).

There's nothing preventing the underlying OTR protocol from being used
to protect arbitrary binary data, so long as the network model
(unreliable, but in-order, delivery) is preserved.  The protocol spec
only says how to use it for IM messages, but someone could easily write
a spec for OTR-protected VoIP, for example.  [You'd probably want to
rekey a little less often, perhaps.]

   - Ian