Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Making your IM secure

Two researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have created an add-on to instant messaging that they claim will enable the participants to identify each other and have a secure conversation without leaving any proof that the chat occurred. The result, dubbed <A HREF="http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5576246.html?tag=zdnn.alert">off-the-record (OTR) messaging</A> by security researchers Ian Goldberg and Nikita Borisov, is a plug-in for the Gaim instant-messaging client that enables encrypted messages sans leaving a key--a sequence of characters--that could be used to verify that the conversation happened. That attribute, known in cryptography as perfect forward security, also prevents snoopers from reading any copies of the conversation.

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