[OTR-dev] OTRv3 instance tag and session switching

[Marin Dzhigarov]

 Hello all,

I'm a developer who is trying to better understand the implementation behind the OTRv3 protocol and more specifically - the instance tags.
According to the protocol draft:

"For version 3 messages, someone receiving a message with a recipient instance tag specified that does not equal their own should discard the message and optionally warn the user. The exception here is the D-H Commit Message where the recipient instance tag may be 0, indicating that no particular instance is specified."

In Pidgin, however, it does not seem that these messages are being discarded - seems to me that instead of discarding them Pidgin is somehow maintaining a separate session for every logged in instance and very session maintains its own Authentication state and Message state, keys, macs etc.

But that is not specified in the OTR protocol and I was wondering how is all of this accomplished? Are you doing something off the protocol?

Could someone please help me with that?

P.S (I'm not looking for code examples or anything like this, just the basic idea behind).

Regards,
Marin