[OTR-dev] OTR + Second Life Client

[Ian Goldberg]

On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 05:05:31PM -0700, chris-tuchs at hushmail.com wrote:
> Ian, thanks for the pointers they were just what I needed.  I now 
> have libotr, libgcrypt, and libgpg-error all building as part of 
> the second life client.  So I am about to actually start writing 
> code to use OTR now.  Yay!
> 
> However a niggling feature request keeps coming up, at the least it 
> is a request for education.  How can OTR be used for more than two 
> people to share an off the record conversation?

That is Very Complicated, because it's not obvious what "deniable" and
"off-the-record" mean when there are more than two people involved.  We
have a tech report that addresses that question:

Multi-party Off-the-Record Messaging
Ian Goldberg, Berkant Ustaoğlu, Matthew Van Gundy, Hao Chen, CACR Tech
Report 2009-27, June 2009. 
http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/techreports/2009/cacr2009-27.pdf

But for now, the answer is that OTR can only be used between two people.
So you can set up all-pairs OTR communication, but Bob has no assurance
that Alice sent the same messages to him as she did to Carol.

   - Ian