Disabling OTR in Spark

Openfire Openfire Support
1

How I can disable OTR in Spark?

OTR is an encrypted comminucation between two clients that is based on personal certificates. It has a high level of encryption and con not the read by anyone else that the two partners. In a corporate environment, this might be problematic for compliance/legal reasons since companys might be required to document internal discussions (SOX compliance, Anti trust regulation etc.).

There are two ways to disable it:

  1. Repackage Spark to prvent the distribution of the OTR plugin
  2. Disable the negotiation of the OTR connection between two clients.

  • Repackaging and customizing of Spark is documented in Spark Dev: http://community.igniterealtime.org/docs/DOC-2163

  • Packet-filtering, or content-filtering, rather, is how I’ve disabled OTR for my users. It’s pretty simple:
    Go to Server -> Server Settings -> Content Filter. Set your pattern to “?OTR” and enable the filter.
    Users attempting to enable OTR chat will see it trying to initialize and it will timeout after 10 seconds.

Based on Disabling OTR in Spark2.6.3

2

I know these are old instructions but we have disabled this on 4.2.2 with Spark 2.8.3 build 960. In spark you can click the padlock icon and it times out however if you click it again it encrypts the conversation. how do we block this?

3

There is no easy way to do this. As it is mentioned in the post, you can repackage Spark removing the plugin (or blacklisting via default.properties), but you will have to do this every time Spark updates and distribute updated spark.jar to every PC.

You can probably make a script which will remove this plugin (otr.jar) from Program files\Spark\plugins and %Appdata%\Spark\plugins (both folder and jar). Say on every startup or shutdown.

You can also deactivate plugins in user’s spark.properties file (%appdata%\Spark). deactivatedPlugins=

Obviously advanced users would be able to circumvent these restrictions by activating it again, installing Spark on the side and copying otr.jar back to their profile’s plugins folder.