ImperialViolet

“Off the record” is, unfortunately, an overloaded term. To many it's feature in gTalk and AOL IM which indicates that the conversation isn't logged. However, to crypto folks it's a protocol for secure chat.

(In fact, resoloving the ambiguity is on the EFF's wish list.)

Pidgin has been my chat client of choice for some time because it's pretty fully featured and supports OTR via a plugin. However, I just don't trust it from a security point of view. The latest incident was only a couple of weeks ago: CVE-2011-3919.

So, I implemented otr in Go, as well as an XMPP library and client. It's an absolutely minimal client (except for OTR support) and implements only what I absolutely need in a client.

But it does mean that the whole stack, including the TLS library, is implemented in a memory safe language. (On the other hand, pretty much everything in that stack, from the modexp function to the terminal handling code was written by me and has never really been audited. I'm a decent programmer but I'm sure there are some howlers of security issues in there somewhere.)