[OTR-users] List of OTR-aware software

[Brian Morrison]

db wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 8:59 PM, Michael Reichenbach
> <michael_reichenbach at freenet.de> wrote:
>> There are also already nice articles in the wiki.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_messaging_clients
> 
> In this article you can read
> 
>> The primary motivation behind the protocol was providing deniability for the conversation participants while keeping conversations confidential, like a private conversation in real life, or off the record in journalism sourcing. This is in contrast with the majority of cryptography tools which resemble more a signed writing on paper, which can be used, at a later date, as a tool to demonstrate that the communication happened, who participated in it, and about what it was. Unfortunately, in most cases people using ordinary cryptography software are not aware of this and in most cases they would be better served by OTR tools instead. Hence the initial introductory paper was named "Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not To Use PGP".[1]
> 
> I really don't understand the purpose with OTR in any regular context.
> Why do you want to be able to deny what you have written/said to
> friends/colleges? Besides, OTR can not live up to this promise in a
> more European legal system where courts typically can consider any
> type of evidence/they are free to sift evidence at their will (e.g.,
> if you have backup copies of logs that are several years old, and
> these backups pre-dates a court case with a good margin, and these
> copies are identical to the logs in you IM client most court would
> consider these logs strong evidence).

If you are using OTR, you should not be keeping any logs. The point is
plausible deniability. If the keys are ephemeral, then the content of
your conversations is protected from compromise because *any* plaintext
can result from ciphertext protected with an unknown and unknowable key.
It makes no difference whether the authorities have your intercepted
ciphertext, it could say anything and all they can assume from it is
some kind of association with another person, they cannot prove anything
and you cannot be forced to compromise or incriminate yourself because
you do not have the session key(s) at the time or later.

> 
> The only reasonable use for OTR is in contexts such as in Tibet. A
> typical user in a democratic society are probably much more interested
> in the type of confidentiality you are used to when you do online
> banking - that is, prevention of eaves dropping.

Everyone should take all possible steps to protect their private
conversations, privacy is the root of a civilized society, no one else
has any rights to know what I am talking about with anyone else. That
especially includes governments and their agents, just because they can
monitor electronic communication does not mean that it should be any
easier for them than recording and transcribing ever voice conversation
taking place in the entire country.

> 
> In my case OTR even caused a lot of headache since most of my chat
> logs are trivial and I like to store them in my gmail account. Now I
> just have a lot of encrypted logs I never will be able to decode =
> phone numbers to friend's friends, e-mail addresses etc are lost
> forever.

Then don't store these important pieces of information in these logs
that you should not be keeping anyway, extract it and save it
separately. But remember that it might be incriminating in itself.

I'm very puzzled as to why you're using OTR, it appears to not do what
you want at all.

-- 

Brian