Research :: Summary :: IRC3 :: Utilities :: Security

Introduction

This project is to create a replacement to the current IRC technology. Due to major weaknesses in the current protocol IRC Networks are currently prone to many important issues. My aim is to solve these problems and expand the scope of IRC

You can find more detailed information on this project at http://www.phishy.net. Unfortuantly I have not had time to update the documents located on this site for sometime there are some key differences between my implementation and the documentation. I hope to correct this soon!

You can find the most recent builds of the reference implementation at http://phuture.phishy.net/builds. Please note that this code is experimental and does contain security issues I am aware of. The code will be fully audited before a beta release is issued. The code is for interest or development purposes only.

Summary

IRC is a very simple but effective concept. A group of people send lines of text to each other, each line of text gets sent to all members of the group. A very apt analogy is citizen band radio, each user chooses a handle (referred to as a nickname on IRC) and can then send messages to everyone listening on a chosen channel (the concept of a group I referred to above). Within IRC it is also possible to send messages privately to individuals, this is something that isn't possible with CB radio. A set of IRC servers connected together is referred to as an IRC Network.

As very little personal information needs to be portrayed in one's online profile, IRC is considerably more anonymous than traditional methods of communication. From a sociological standpoint this leads to some interesting anomalies, people tend to be more open which leads to many new friendships and territorial instincts tend to show themselves in full colour! I will leave this side of the subject at this point, as I personally think it deserves a project of its own.

From a business/educational point of view the IRC model has some big advantages. It is cheap; client and server software are both readily available at no cost. It can be recorded, this is generally referred to as logging and results in minutes being taken automatically. It is much easier to keep track of what is being said during a discussion as it is always possible to read back over previous text.

At this present time only a small proportion of what is possible is being seen. I would like to see a huge online community exchanging ideas and information which spans the globe. The myriad of companies with a computer at every desk could benefit massively from the use of IRC in the workplace.

There are several reasons for the under-utilisation of the concept/implementation of IRC. The overall reason being, that IRC has outgrown its initial design. The current IRC protocol does not handle load and reliability problems in a satisfactory fashion. Also large IRC networks do not provide any workable way of finding the right people to talk to, you just end up wandering from channel to channel rather than finding yourself a "home".

The core purpose of this project has been to solve the architectural problems of the current implementation and to structure a new protocol/implementation in such a way that new features can be added to truly exploit this predominately group-based communication concept.