[OTR-users] Does OTR cache authentication questions?

[Lachezar Dobrev]

  Are you by any chance using Google Talk (now Hangouts)?

  AFAIK OTR uses the IM's communication channel to send and receive
peer authentication in specially formatted messages.
  With the recent changes in Google Talk I've had numerous occasions
where messages I sent to my contacts got stalled, and not resent until
my peers started using different client/device, sometimes with a week
of delay. That might be an underlying cause of your problem.


2013/9/10 Pete Stephenson <pete at heypete.com>:
> Hi all,
>
> I just ran into an interesting situation with a friend of mine. We
> both use OTR 4.0.0-1 for Pidgin/libpurple 2.10.7 on Windows 7 64-bit.
>
> A month or two ago we tried authenticating using the
> question-and-answer method. For some unknown reason, one particular
> authentication question never made it from my system to his, so I hit
> cancel. An hour or so later I tried again and the authentication
> worked.
>
> Today, my friend and I were chatting unencrypted, without OTR (he was
> using a new system that had Pidgin but not OTR, while I was still
> using the same system as I had been before). After a few minutes of
> chatting, he installed OTR and I tried authenticating him with the
> question-and-answer authentication using a different question than the
> one I asked a month or two ago.
>
> Unbeknownst to me, my friend was prompted for the undelivered question
> from the session a month or so ago rather than the question I asked
> during this session. Naturally, he failed the authentication attempt
> since the answer to the undelivered question was different from the
> answer to today's question. A second attempt today at
> question-and-answer authentication worked correctly.
>
> Does OTR cache authentication questions in case they're not delivered
> by the underlying IM service?
>
> Since we both thought this was a bug and wanted to provide a more
> detailed bug report we tried replicating the situation but were unable
> to successfully do so. Sorry. I suppose we could blame it on cosmic
> rays or planetary alignment or something. :)
>
> Cheers!
> -Pete
>
> --
> Pete Stephenson
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