1 TODO/bugs in Irssi SILC client
2 ==============================
4 o Add local command to switch the channel's private key when channel has
5 several private keys. Currently sending channel messages with many
6 keys is not possible because changing the key is not possible by the
9 o JOINing to +a (requires passphrase to JOIN) does not work on autojoin.
10 Seems the passwords in the .silc/config has no effect.
12 o Add local commands to list the current server and client public keys
13 that the user has. And a local command to dump the contents of the
14 public key to the screen. Something like LISTKEYS, SHOWKEY...
16 o We should get rid of the clientconfig.[ch] in Irssi SILC and move the
17 cipher, hash, hmac and pkcs configuration to the Irssi SILC's config
20 o Add PERL scripting support from Irssi CVS.
22 o Extend the /HELP command to support sub commands or something. So
23 that user can say /help set mutual_authentication they would get
24 help of the mutual_authentication setting.
26 o Set different kind of settings, like, /set mutual_authentication,
27 /set key_exchange_timeout, /set conn_auth_timeout etc etc.
30 TODO/bugs In SILC Client Library
31 ================================
33 o The PRIVATE_MESSAGE_KEY packet is not handled (it is implemented
34 though). This should be added and perhaps new client operation
35 should be added to notify application that it was received and
36 set the key only if application wishes to set (accept the key) it.
38 o Additions to do after protocol version 1.1:
40 o Fix the NICK_CHANGE notify handling not to create new entry
41 for the changed client, but take the nickname from the notify
42 (removes need for resolving as well). Protocol TODO entry 3.
44 o Add support for list of errors in command replies. Protocol
48 TODO/bugs In SILC Server
49 ========================
51 o The router should check for validity of received notify packets from
52 servers (after all buggy servers may send notify that is actually
53 something that should have not been sent).
55 o Add hashed passwords to silcd.conf file.
57 o Backup router related issues
59 o Channel user mode changes are notified unnecessarely when
60 switching to backup router on router crash.
62 o Add a timeout to handling incoming JOIN commands. It should be
63 enforced that JOIN command is executed only once in a second or two
64 seconds. Now it is possible to accept n incoming JOIN commands
65 and process them without any timeouts. THis must be employed because
66 each JOIN command will create and distribute the new channel key
67 to everybody on the channel.
69 o New configuration file format must be added. The new one will be
70 done using the dotconf config library (lib/dotconf). The following
71 tasks relates closely to this as well and must be done at the same time
72 when adding the new config file format:
74 o Server says that it is able to listen on multiple ports but
75 currently that is bogus. It can, but internals are for single
78 o Protocol execution timeouts are hard coded, should be
81 o IP address fields in configuration file should accept mask
82 format as well, IP/MASK, and not just plain IP.
84 o If client's public key is saved in the server (and doing public key
85 authentication) then the hostname and the username information could
86 be taken from the public key. Should be a configuration option!
89 TODO/bugs In SILC Libraries
90 ===========================
92 o WIN32 silc_net_create_connection_async does not work the same way
93 than on Unix. Do it with threads on WIN32. The function works but
94 is not actually async currently.
96 o Rewrite the lib/silcsim/silcsim.h. The SilcSimContext should be
97 private and silc_sim_alloc should take necessary arguments.
100 TODO in SILC Protocol
101 =====================
103 Current protocol version is 1.0. However, it is far from being perfect,
104 and needs to include additional features. Following protocol TODO entries
105 describe new stuff to be added to protocol versions 1.x.
107 1. Re-define the Status Payload: it is now 16 bits, split it into two
108 8 bits fields. First field includes status types from 0 - 9 and
109 10 - n *if* it is not an list of errors. If it is list of errors then
110 the first field includes 1, 2 and/or 3, and the second field includes
111 the error status 10 - n. This way it is possible to send multiple
112 errors (list of errors) and we have a way to tell the receiver that
113 there will be other errors as well. The second field is used only
114 if there is list of errors. If normal status, or normal (single)
115 error status the second field is set to zero, and must be ignored.
116 Hence, the status works same way as now except for list of errors.
117 To be included in protocol version 1.1.
119 2. Define that WHOIS and IDENTIFY commands must send list of errors
120 if multiple Client ID (or Channel ID and Server ID for IDENTIFY) was
121 requested and was not found. Each unfound entry must cause an error
122 command reply to the sender. Also define that errors must be sent
123 *after* sending successfully found entries (this way receiver may
124 ignore them). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
126 3. Define the NICK_CHANGE notify to send the changed nickname as a new
127 third argument. This will make the NICK_CHANGE notify handling easier
128 in the receiver's end (client primarily) since it removes the
129 requirement that receiver must resolve (using IDENTIFY or WHOIS) the
130 new Client ID received in the notify (because of the new nickname is
131 unknown). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
133 4. Add "request parameters" or similar to the WHOIS command, which can
134 be used to request various parameters (something not returned by
135 standard WHOIS command) about clients (info that could be fetched
136 even from clients). Additional specification (or appendix) should
137 be done to define the payload and the parameters. It could be used
138 to make the WHOIS command support various search conditions as well.
139 This would be the way to extend the WHOIS command to support various
140 new features without always making the command incompatible to previous
141 version. To be included in protocol version 1.1.
143 5. Inviting and banning by public key should be made possible. To be
144 included in protocol version 1.x.
146 6. Add perhaps SILENCE_USERS, SILENCE_OPERS channel user modes which
147 can be used to silence (moderate) normal users and opers (this set
148 only by founder). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
150 7. Channel Message Payload needs slight redesining to include the IV
151 field to the MAC generation of the payload. It is authenticated
152 by the packet's MAC but not by the payload's MAC. Since the IV
153 belongs to the payload, its integrity should be protected by the
154 payload MAC and not alone by packet MAC. To be included in protocol
157 8. Remove the administrative commands from the protocol all together.
158 It does not make sense for the protocol to define how a server is
159 reconnected or shutdown, since they are implementation and
160 configuration issues. Besides protocol provides only limited set of
161 administrative commands and cannot define all that one could imagine.
162 To be included in protocol version 1.1.
164 9. Add SILC_MESAGE_FLAG_REPLY for being other side to the
165 SILC_MESSAGE_FLAG_REQUEST. Add generic SILC_MESSAGE_FLAG_DATA, which
166 can include generic payload, which can include generic data. The
167 payload definition is left out for now. To be included in protocol
174 A rough list of stuff that is going to be done to SILC after 1.0 or at
177 o Implement the defined SilcDH API. The definition is in
178 lib/silccrypt/silcdh.h.
180 o X.509 certificate support. SILC protocol supports certificates and
181 it would be great to have support for them. This is a big task as
182 support has to be made for ASN.1 as well. I've looked into OpenSSL
183 package as it has X.509 certificate support (and ASN.1 as well).
184 The code does not look very good to my eye but it has some potentials.
185 This should be looked at more closely.
187 Naturally own SILC Certificate API has to be defined regardles what
188 the actual X.509 library is (OpenSSL X.509 or something else). Other
189 choice is to write own X.509 library but I'm not going to do it -
190 I can help to migrate the OpenSSL X.509 into SILC and I can help if
191 someone would like to write the X.509 library - but I'm not going
192 to start writing one myself. Anyhow, the OpenSSL X.509 lib should
195 Other package that should be checked is the NSS's X509 library,
196 which I like more over OpenSSL package.
198 o SSH2 public keys support, allowing the use of SSH2 public keys in
201 o OpenPGP certificate support, allowing the use of PGP public keys
204 o Compression routines are missing. The protocol supports packet
205 compression thus it must be implemented. SILC Zip API must be
208 o Rewrite the lib/silcutil/silcprotocol.[ch] not to have [un]register
209 functions, but to make it context based all the way. The alloc should
210 take as argument the protocol type and its callback (not only
211 final callback). It is not good that we have now global list of
212 registered protocols.
214 o Optimizations in Libraries
216 o There is currently three (3) allocations per packet in the
217 silc_packet_receive_process, which is used to process and
218 dispatch all packets in the packet queue to the parser callback
219 function. First allocation is for parse_ctx, second for the
220 SilcPacketContext, and third for packet->buffer where the actual
223 The parse_ctx allocation can be removed by adding it as a
224 structure to the SilcPacketContext. When the SilcPacketContext
225 is allocated there is space for the parse context already.
227 The silc_packet_context_alloc could have a free list of
228 packet contexts. If free packet context is found from the list
229 it is returned instead of allocating a new one. The library
230 could at first allocate them and save them to the free list
231 until enough contexts for smooth processing exists in the list.
232 This would remove a big allocation since the structure is
233 quite big, and even bigger if it would include the parse_ctx.
235 The packet->buffer can be optimized too if the SilcBuffer
236 interface would support free lists as well. Maybe such could
237 be done in the same way as for SilcPacketContext. The
238 silc_buffer_alloc would check free list before actually
239 allocating new memory. Since the packets in the SILC protocol
240 usually are about the same size (due to padding) it would be
241 easy to find suitable size buffer from the free list very
244 These naturally cause the overal memory consumption to grow
245 but would take away many allocations that can be done several
248 o Move the actual file descriptor task callback (the callback that
249 handles the incoming data, outgoing data etc, that is implemnted
250 in server and client separately (silc_server_packet_process and
251 silc_client_packet_proces)) to the low level socket connection
252 handling routines, and create an interface where the application
253 can register a callbacks for incoming data, outoing data and EOF
254 receiving, which the library will call when necessary. This way
255 we can move the data handling in one place.
257 o Add silc_id_str2id to accept the destination buffer as argument
258 and thus not require any memory allocation. Same will happen
259 with silc_id_payload_* functions.
261 o Optimizations in Server
263 o Remove the big switch statement from the function
264 silc_server_packet_parse_type and replace it with predefined
265 table of function pointers where each of the slot in table
266 represents the packet type value.
268 Same could be done with notify packets which has big switch
269 statement too. Same kind of table of notify callbacks could be
272 o The parser callback in the server will add a timeout task for
273 all packets. It will require registering and allocating a
274 new task to the SilcSchedule. Maybe, at least, for server
275 and router packets the parser would be called immediately
276 instead of adding it to the scheduler with 0 timeout. It
277 should be analyzed too how slow the task registering process
278 actually is, and find out ways to optimize it.
280 o Add SilcAsyncOperation to utility library.
282 o Cipher optimizations (asm, that this) at least for i386 would be nice.
284 o Add builtin SOCKS and HTTP Proxy support, well the SOCKS at least.
285 SILC currently supports SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 but it needs to be compiled