Together, Adium, Pidgin and OTR are supposed to offer a robust, secure messaging experience across almost any instant messaging network. It also employs something called "perfect forward secrecy," which ensures that, even if an attacker were able to obtain the encryption keys to your conversation, they wouldn't be able to decrypt previously sent messages that might have been intercepted in the past. It's a pretty smart piece of cryptography that ensures the person you're speaking with is who they say they are, and that during your conversation, messages cannot be forged. OTR makes it easy for two people to have private, encrypted conversations over instant messaging. One popular libpurple plug-in is called libotr, or Off-the-Record messaging, perhaps the most widely recommended method for secure messaging besides email with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). Pidgin and Adium are really just user interface wrappers that are built on top. Put another way, libpurple is the Swiss army knife of instant messaging, with 15 instant messaging apps in one.
It was created so that, with just one app, users could chat with friends on multiple different instant messaging services at the same time. Libpurple has been in development since 1998. Libpurple is the Swiss army knife of instant messaging, with 15 instant messaging apps in one And while the perceived severity of libpurple's problems depend on who you talk to, there's a common refrain that surfaces regularly online-that it's time to replace Pidgin, Adium and similar apps with something else entirely.
One researcher described libpurple to Motherboard as a perennial target for exploitation, burdened by what some perceive as an old, bloated codebase and cryptographic features that aren't part of libpurple's design, but merely layered on top. This isn't news to those in the security community.
And security-or its lack thereof-is why a lot of people think libpurple should be replaced. But just because something is popular doesn't necessarily mean it's secure. It's the common codebase upon which some of the most popular instant messaging clients, including Adium and Pidgin, are built. There's a good chance you've encountered libpurple, even if you don't know it by name.
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