Off The Record Messaging

Today instant messaging is very often implemented in clear text. Anybody having access to one of the used networks in between you and your correspondent may have the possibility to read your messages. Furthermore, it is often impossible for you to know that messages you receive have not be tampered with or that the person you are writing to is who they pretend to be. Off The Record (OTR) messaging provides encryption, authentication, deniability, and strong forward secrecy. It is already implemented in many of the popular instant messengers like for example Kopete, Pidgin, Adium, mICQ, Miranda, and Trillian. OTR uses the AES symmetric-key algorithm, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange, and the SHA-1 hash function.

The project will include a research phase during which you would have to determine whether you’ll be using an existing Java implementation of OTR or, alternately, porting libotr to Java. You would also have to design and implement a GUI extension that would allow you to configure the OTR module in SIP Communicator.

References:

Home page for OTR as well as the libotr and pidgin-otr implementations
http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/

Nikita Borisov, Ian Goldberg, Eric Brewer (2004-10-28). “Off-the-Record Communication, or, Why Not To Use PGP”. Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society. Retrieved on 2006-08-29.
http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/otr-wpes.pdf

More info on OTR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging

The Pidgin home page
http://www.pidgin.im

OTR for Kopete
http://kopete-otr.follefuder.org/

A fresh sourceforge project for a otr java implementation
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jotr/

The JOTR blog
http://blog.blathersource.org/blog/archives/69-What-is-Daniel-doing-now.html

Other SIP Communicator GSoC 2008 Projects
http://www.sip-communicator.org/gsoc

SIP Communicator Developer Documentation
http://www.sip-communicator.org/index.php/Documentation/DeveloperDocumentation

The official SIP Communicator website
http://www.sip-communicator.org