[OTR-dev] Greetings from the ScatterChat project!

[Paul Wouters]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2006, J. Salvatore Testa II wrote:

Hi Joe,

Thanks for your talk at Hope6.

>     I honestly believe that our two projects can co-exist peacefully, and
> as proof of this, I offer you my C-implementation of the Elliptic
> Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and Elliptic Curve Diffie
> Hellman algorithm (ECDH).  I implemented them over NIST curve P-521
> with libgcrypt, and they pass several ANSI tests.  They require just a
> bit more polishing before I can package them, but I thought I would
> ask now if you're interested.

If you attached anything, it did not survive posting to the list, so perhaps
you should post a link to the files?

I know that Elliptic Curve cryptography is surrounded by lots of patents,
and I think the OTR developers do wish to keep OTR free of any patents.

Also, one of the key features is the ability to deny that you said something
via OTR. Digital signatures would break that repudiation, as it leaves
a digital proof that you said something.

Though as you pointed out in your talk, the one function that OTR seems to
be missing is that it cannot be used for large data transfers, such as
a file sharing between two people, or VOIP. However, it should not be too
difficult to implement a symmetric key generation and exchange via OTR to
use as throw away encryption keys for such session transfers. I believe
that would be a useful extension to OTR.

Paul