[OTR-users] OTR in UK Tech Website Article

[Aldert J.B.P. Hazenberg]

Paradigms for Paranoids

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/14/codecon_paradigm_for_paranoids/

Published Monday 14th February 2005 22:15 GMT

Codecon 2005 The fourth annual CodeCon - "a workshop for developers of 
real-world applications that support individual liberties" - convened Friday 
afternoon (11 Feb) at Club NV (envy, not Nevada), amid ghostly laptop panels 
hovering in violet-tinted danceclub murk.

First-day registrations reached a respectable 90 (at $80 each), with more 
expected as the weekend progresses.

The highlight among the first day's five presentations was Ian Goldberg and 
Nikita Borisov on Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR), where 'messaging' can be 
instant messaging in any of its various formats, including online games, and 
"off the record" is meant to emulate as closely as possible the realworld 
strategy of sneaking off somewhere private, where you can talk with 
absolutely no record of what you said that might come back later to haunt 
you. (I was reminded of Maxwell Smart's ill-omened Cone of Silence.)

Conventional crypto technologies are optimised for (e.g.) enduring longterm 
contracts, but OTR prefers that messages be written as if in sand, via 
"perfect forward secrecy" (PFS) and "repudiable authentication". (Even if 
your conversation is cracked and transcribed, the programmers have included a 
"forgery toolkit" that allows you to repudiate such transcripts as trivial to 
forge.)

With such glorious levels of intimate distrust, I was surprised Ian didn't 
name his exemplary chatterers "Bill" and "Monica" - both Ian and Nikita were 
witty presenters, with the former doing funny voices, and the latter 
offering, when a projector bulb blew during their demo, to substitute an 
interpretive dance.

Another maniacally brilliant twist is that they can invisibly solicit OTR 
dialogs from strangers in chat by appending an inconspicuous all-whitespace 
flag, consisting of a characteristic arrangement of 24 spaces and tabs. And 
it was a pleasure, as well, to hear the consistently high level of followup 
questions after their talk.