Mcabber and PGP

Today I decided to play with a number of new things. One was conky:

And the other was mcabber. A simple chat client that uses the jabber protocol. Those of you who are used to using Facebook Chat, GChat, and other website specific chat application might wonder why you'd ever want to use a desktop application. After all, most of us stopped using AIM in the late 2000's.

But back in those simple times we were all used to having our own chat clients instead of storing everything in 3rd party servers. Not to say everything wasn't logged then as well, but you know, ahem. Anyway! This is how to connect to the google chat servers via mcabber and then use pgp to encrypt your communications.

Using your favorite package manager download mcabber and gpg. The best guide for setting up and understanding gpg can be found here if you need to set that up. Once you've got mcabber downloaded you'll need to create your configuration file: ~/.mcabberrc. 

set jid = <your gmail address>
set username = <your gmail address>
set server = talk.google.com
set port = 5223
set priority = 4
set ignore_self_presence = 1
set ssl = 1
set ssl_verify = 1
set logging = 0
set pgp =1 
set pgp_private_key = <use gpg --list-keys --keyid-format long>
set beep_on_message = 1

You can find more configuration options online with google or looking through documentation. One that I found which had a lot of good comments can be read here. As noted above, you'll want to put your own email address for the jid and the username. Then use the long form of your private key from gpg --list-keys --keyid-format long.

Once this is done you're pretty much there but getting used to mcabber can be improved by mastering a few simple commands.

mcabber does have tab complete, so you can quickly do these commands that way, it also supports bindings. For example, within your mcabberrc file you can do things like this: 

bind 17 = quit #q for quit
bind 24 = roster unread_first #x for jumping to next message
bind 26 = roster toggle_offline #z for toggling offline people 
alias me = say /me

When experimenting with the pgp encypted chatting, it's a good idea to use the /info and /pgp info commands to determine if you have another user's keys or not and to verify that the key is the same one you have stored in your gpg chain (use gpg --list-keys to check). Once you've confirmed that you're using the right keys, according to the manual if you have set pgp = 1 within your rc file then your communications will automatically be encrypted. However, when testing this with a friend of mine we noticed this wasn't always the case and on occasions we needed to use /pgp info before the encrypted communications would begin, or we needed to use the pgp setkey foo@bar.net KEYFROMPGPKEY command to set the key ourselves.

Him and I troubleshot the problem for a bit, eventually giving up around 1am in the morning after being unable to figure out why my client would automatically encrypt messages but his required a /pgp force command. If you run into similar issues here are a few things to check:

All said and done, you might ask yourself, why? Why should you encrypted your chat conversations? Well there's plenty of reasons. For example, what if you're talking about something like a disease? A close family death? Or anything like that that you don't think anyone else should know? What if you're an activists staging a protest and you want to be sure that it comes as a surprise for maximum impact (and you're wearing your tinfoil hat)? What if you're a journalist chatting with a leak source? What if you're a leak chatting to a journalist? Or a developer talking to another and exchanging passwords for a database or web server? There are plenty of reasons to want to encrypt your chat that aren't nefarious. And mcabber and gpg make it very simple to have automatic encryption right away.