Off-the-Record Instant Messaging for Group Conversation

Instant messaging (IM) is becoming an integral part of social as well as business life. The main concern with IM systems is that the information being transmitted is easily accessible. Although some protection could be achieved with the use of a secure tunneling (i.e. VPN etc.), they do not provide end-to-end secrecy. Off-the-record (OTR) is a protocol which enables IM users to have private conversations over the open and insecure public Internet. However, the OTR protocol currently does not support multi-user chat rooms. There is a need for such a product that provides users an opportunity to meet in an IM-based, virtual, and encrypted chat room. This project implements an extension of the two-party OTR protocol, named Group OTR-GOTR. GOTR enables users to have a free and secure multi-user communication environment with no proprietary software requirement. The case study describes a proof of concept plug-in of GOTR developed for the GAIM, as well as the plug-in implementation details. Such a product is believed to be beneficial to small businesses to keep their privacy and their competitiveness.