JJB Blog

Adium now supports encryption with other Adium users over any protocol. This is great but things aren’t perfect yet. Here are a few of my observations. Post your own observations in the comments.

• If person A requests an encrypted session, and person B doesn’t see the request, and person A tries again, and then person B discovers both windows making the request, and then clicks OKAY on both of them, then person B will first accept the most recent key, and then the older, no longer valid key, and the session won’t be created properly. One person will be sending garbled text using the wrong key.
• If person A and person B both have encryption set to “automatic”, things go quite smoothly, with two exceptions:
  1. Judging from how things appear textually, it seems that the first message is never encrypted. This might just be how things happen to be visually formatted though.
  2. As with non-automatic sessions, the first time a connection is established keys have to be shared, and this still requires a manual OKAY click to accept the key. So similar problems described above can happen… person A doesn’t see the request, person B does… person B gives up and turns off encryption, person A finally sees the request and says OKAY, and there is an asymetric key state, with one person sending clear text, the other person sending garbled text.
• If person A is on Adium that supports encryption, and has it set to “automatic”, and person B is on an older version of Adium, person A will sometimes (always?) see the little padlock icon in its locked state, falsely indicating that the conversation is being encrypted.
• If an encrypted message is sent to someone who doesn’t have your key and can’t read it, in my opinion the error message: “You sent encrypted data to johnjosephbachir@jabber.org/Adium, who wasn’t expecting it”, isn’t alarming enough. It needs to say something like “WARNING: YOUR MESSAGE COULD NOT BE DECRYPTED BY THE REMOTE NODE”.

Did I miss anything? Am I misunderstanding anything?

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