A user study of off-the-record messaging

Abstract

Instant messaging is a prevalent form of communication across the Internet, yet most instant messaging services provide little security against eavesdroppers or impersonators. There are a variety of existing systems that aim to solve this problem, but the one that provides the highest level of privacy is Off-the-Record Messaging (OTR), which aims to give instant messaging conversations the level of privacy available in a face-to-face conversation. In the most recent redesign of OTR, as well as increasing the security of the protocol, one of the goals of the designers was to make OTR easier to use, without users needing to understand details of computer security such as keys or fingerprints.