Add OTR (off-the-record messaging) support to BitlBee

[anonymous]

Make BitlBee support OTR (off-the-record messaging:  http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/).

This would allow people to have encrypted conversations with IMers. The connection between the IRC client and BitlBee would *not* be encrypted but this isn't always critical.

For example, I run BitlBee on my desktop and only connect to it via localhost. Then I use an Emacs IRC client (ERC) to connect to BitlBee and chat with my IMing friends. Before switching from Gaim to Emacs/ERC/BitlBee, my friends and I used OTR to encrypt our conversations.

The gaim-otr plugin's NEWS file and comments in lib-otr say that OTR can't work over IRC because IRC's maximum message size is too small.

Thanks!

[jelmer]

Isn't this a dupe of #44...?

[jelmer]

Now that BitlBee has plugin support, maybe this would be something that's nice to implement as a plugin?

I don't think functionality like this is likely to ever going to be part of the main bitlbee.

[happy@…]

I didn't see #44 before submitting--sorry. But my perspective is that OTR is the best option for adding encryption support to BitlBee--at least Gaim and Adium (on the Mac) support it.

[wilmer]

Well, since this is about OTR and #44 is about GPG, it's not a complete dupe. But it's certainly a wishlist bug. :-)

[hobart AT gmail]

Other users clients end up shoving spaces+tabs to attempt OTR initiation regardless, this comes thru ugly for the bee users :-) (see im-strangeness.png attachment)

[anonymous]

what other IM clients auto-attempting OTR initiation looks like to bitlbee users

[wilmer]

Ahh! I saw those in messages from a colleague too and I already wondered where they came from. They're indeed a bit annoying. :-(

[grey]

I second (third/fourth? Whatever) this. OTR support in bitlbee would be RAD!

[sia@…]

Another vote for OTR support in bitlbee!

--igor

[cenrim@…]

And another vote for OTR!

[micah@…]

and another

[tk]

vote

[anonymous]

Please add OTR! You would be the first CLI client to have support for it.

[anonymous]

i would use bitlbee if it had otr support

[anonymous]

vote too !

[onyx]

otr would be great, please add support :/

[anonymous]

i would definitely use bitlbee more with the encryption. in the world we live in today; you never know who is watching.

[ph]

please add otr support :(

[XTaran]

OTR support for Bitlbee indeed would be a cool feature.

[anonymous]

Replying to anonymous:

i would use bitlbee if it had otr support

same here. please add otr support

[anonymous]

agree!

[valentin.haenel@…]

OTR is supposed to be end 2 end. if you aren't using a bitlbee on localhost , its not really end 2 end.

If you can code c , you may be able to help us with:

 http://sourceforge.net/projects/otr-irssi/

cause we are way to busy with uni at the moment.

V-

[grey@…]

I had been begging Ian about OTR fragmentation support so that it could fit in an irc max message length. My friend Jake pestered him @ PET earlier this summer and he said he had an intern/student working on it.

Well, I just checked and it looks like it was finally added in libotr from the libotr-3.1.0 changelog!

"Large messages are now fragmented transparently instead of failing"

(and not to disrespect otr-irssi project, but I don't want to be tied to a particular IRC client, this was an OTR implementation flaw that was different in spec, but never implemented properly upstream by them)

w00t!

[M Spreij]

Blissfully ignorant of the technical details; would allowing bitlbee to connect through an OTR Proxy not be easier than implementing (plugin or no) it directly? Comments welcome at gmail.com@mspreij

[anonymous]

M Spreij - there is an OTR proxy from the OTR team already. It works with only /one/ IM protocol (AIM), and is a GUI program (BLARGH evil!), moreover getting it to work with Bitlbee, while doable (I've done it) is a bit of a pita - it will only work in one proxy mode (iirc http? not socks? I don't remember), and moreover when it does work it mangles buddy names (e.g. inserted extra spaces and stuff like that). It's basically a PoS and there's a reason why the otr staff haven't really devoted any development time to updating it.

However, you can use it today, with bitlbee - with the following caveats mentioned above (recap: runs as GUI, AIM only, only works in one proxy mode, mangles things that it shouldn't).

[pesco@…]

OTR support for BitlBee has been implemented, funded by stonedcoder.org. The bzr branch can be found at  http://khjk.org/~pesco/bitlbee-otr/.

[anonymous]

This is great news!

Will this be merged into the main bitlbee code soon?

[anonymous]

Awesome! I've been waiting for this. :-)

[anonymous]

This is fantastic news, and what will get me using bitlbee. When can we expect this to be merged into the official releases?

[anonymous]

Does anybody know how to get the OTR code working with bitlbee? The documentation at khjk.org is rather sparse.

[anonymous]

"If you want to check out one of these branches, use bzr. Your web browser will just show empty directories, you have to use bzr to download the real code!"

bzr:  http://www.bazaar-ng.org/

[anonymous]

I get randomly disconnected from AIM when this version of bitlbee receives some OTR messages. This is being caused by another person on my buddy list sending OTR messages that bitlbee is not expecting. Can you fix this?

I'm sorry I do not have more details, but I cannot reproduce it.

[ulim]

There is a functional irssi otr module now called irssi-otr of which I just released v0.1:

 http://projects.tuxfamily.org/group.pl?name=irssiotr

There's a git repo but you can also download a snapshot. Packages for various distros are underway.

Contact me on #bitlbee or by mail to irssiotr at tuxfamily.

[anonymous]

Awesome work ulim! Does it work with AIM/MSN/Yahoo/etc using bitlbee, or will it only work with IRC servers?

[Wilmer van der Gaast <wilmer@…>]

BitlBee wrote:

Awesome work ulim! Does it work with AIM/MSN/Yahoo/etc using bitlbee, or
will it only work with IRC servers?

It most definitely works with everything. If you find any issues, that's
a BitlBee bug (feel free to report, with enough debugging info).

[anonymous]

Replying to pesco@khjk.org:

OTR support for BitlBee has been implemented, funded by stonedcoder.org. The bzr branch can be found at  http://khjk.org/~pesco/bitlbee-otr/.

works fine for me - good work :)

[pesco@…]

Seeing that some people are actually using my code, I've put up a little webpage describing how to get it via bzr, etc. There's also a snapshot-tarball for those reluctant to install yet another VCS. ;)

 http://khjk.org/bitlbee-otr/

Greets, pesco

[wahjava@…]

I've integrated pesco's bitlbee-otr code with bitlbee-1.2.3. The code is available at  http://wahjava.googlepages.com/bitlbee-otr-1.2.3.tar.bz2 (md5: 089e2b3608673a00085283333d7cc32c).

Ashish Shukla

[pesco@…]

Hi, just to drop a note, I've finally come around to run another merge of the trunk into my branch, also integrating the previous updates from ashish. Please let me know of any issues!

pesco

[anonymous]

thanks pesco! your version works fine :D note: i had to install "xmlto" to get the compile to work (bzr version). i hope this gets merged into the official bitlbee. btw, when i did "otr smp <nickname> <secret>" the other user didnt receive the authorization request. instead i got: "smp: received abort from <nickname>". so to trust the user i had to manually enter his private key ("otr trust x x x x x"). he's using pidgin (v. 2.5.1) btw.