[OTR-dev] OTR with Jabber/XMPP

Fri Feb 1 16:49:49 EST 2008

On Mon, Jan 28, 2008 at 06:53:39PM +0100, Timo Engel wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> there are some problems when using the gaim/pidgin plugin with Jabber/XMPP.
> Pidgin uses HTML messages which are described in XEP-0071. A XMPP messages
> which is encrypted with the Gaim/Pidgin OTR Plugin looks like this:
> 
> <message>
>   <body>
>     [EncryptedBody] 
>   </body>
>   <html xmlns='http://jabber.org/protocol/xhtml-im'>
>     <body xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>
>       [EncryptedHTML]
>     </body>
>   </html>
> </message> 
> 
> The contents of [EncryptedBody] and [EncryptedHTML] are the same. After
> decrypting the message, there is HTML code in the body-element. This is not a
> valid XMPP message and is problematic if the client doesn't use HTML.
> 
> The encrypted HTML code is not XML compliant. After decrypting the message it
> could not be parsed from an XML parser. This is really annoying, because the
> client can't display the message.

This has been discussed before.  The ciphertext is valid XML, since the
ciphertext itself contains no markup.  When the user-agent decrypts the
OTR ciphertext to get plaintext, it may have markup, because the OTR
specification says it can.  If the user-agent doesn't understand markup,
the OTR plugin for that user-agent is responsible for removing it.

   - Ian