Off the Record Messaging (also known as OTR) is encryption software for instant messages. Its primary use is as a plugin for the Pidgin and Adium chat clients, which allows encrypted messaging over many platforms including Facebook, Google Chat, XMPP, AIM, and much much more. The OTR team is also developing an encryption platform for messaging in Java apps, and it is in an early beta form at the time of this writing.
OSTIF Goals for Off the Record messaging.
Primary goals:
-Establish a bug bounty to encourage close scrutiny by the worldwide security community.
-A full security audit of the code and of its critical dependencies. This includes the code as it is implemented in the Pidgin and Adium chat applications.
Secondary goals:
Create a grant system to fund the research and development for OTR in the following areas.
-Research – Improve security of OTR implementation through harm minimization techniques.
-Research – Improve development infrastructure and life cycle.
-Research – Harden the software to have better harm minimization when IM software is compromised.
-Development – Improve IM software like Adium and Pidgin with these fixes.
-Development – Improve documentation for OTR.
-Research – Standardize a method for file encryption.
-Development – Reproducible builds.
-Research – Standardize modern cryptography for a new OTR specification.