TODO/bugs in Irssi SILC client
==============================
+ o When autoconnect="yes" is set in silc.conf the irssi complains about
+ unknown chat protocol.
+
+ o Rewrite the notify handling in the new Irssi SILC client.
+
+ o /cumode for unknown nick does not give any error message.
+
o Add local command to switch the channel's private key when channel has
several private keys. Currently sending channel messages with many
keys is not possible because changing the key is not possible by the
that the user has. And a local command to dump the contents of the
public key to the screen. Something like LISTKEYS, SHOWKEY...
- o We should get rid of the clientconfig.[ch] in Irssi SILC and move the
- cipher, hash, hmac and pkcs configuration to the Irssi SILC's config
- file.
-
- o Add auto-nick support to Irssi, so that the user specified nickname
- would be sent to the server immediately (automatically) after the
- client is connected to the server.
-
- o Add PERL scripting support from Irssi CVS.
-
- o Extend the /HELP command to support sub commands or something. So
- that user can say /help set mutual_authentication they would get
- help of the mutual_authentication setting.
-
- o Set different kind of settings, like, /set mutual_authentication,
- /set key_exchange_timeout, /set conn_auth_timeout etc etc.
-
TODO/bugs In SILC Client Library
================================
should be added to notify application that it was received and
set the key only if application wishes to set (accept the key) it.
- o should /nick nick and /nick Nick cause the Nick to be Nick@host becase
- it used to be nick??
-
- o When changing own nickname and there exists a same nickname the library
- can give the client now nickname in format nick@host. This is new
- behaviour and maybe should be removed. The changer should always
- get the one it wants and not have the formatted nickname.
-
o Additions to do after protocol version 1.1:
o Fix the NICK_CHANGE notify handling not to create new entry
TODO/bugs In SILC Server
========================
- o strerror messages from premature EOF's to signoff messages.
+ o Configuration file additions:
- o Backup router related issues
+ o Allow configuration of protocol execution timeouts. This
+ includes SKE, CONN_AUTH and REKEY timeouts. Check all
+ "XXX hardcoded" from the code for these.
- o Channel user mode changes are notified unnecessarely when
- switching to backup router on router crash.
+ o IP address fields in configuration file should accept mask
+ format as well, IP/MASK, and not just plain IP. This would
+ allow subnet filtering etc.
+
+ o Add channel key rekey default timeout.
+
+ o Add (advanced options in General) to set how often certain ID
+ caches are purged (could be used to optimize the server's
+ behaviour).
+
+ o Add hashed passwords to config file.
+
+ o Add rehashing support.
+
+ o Assure that server is allowed to connect only once to router. Meaning
+ if server connection is established already, same connection cannot be
+ established again.
+
+ o If server send CUMODE_CHANGE notify (like setting founder) to router
+ and router does not have founder on channel (founder is left or there's
+ no founder on channel at all), the router will accept the server's
+ founder mode change, even though it perhaps should not do that.
+
+ o Make the normal server save user counts with LIST command reply.
+
+ o The router should check for validity of received notify packets from
+ servers (after all buggy servers may send notify that is actually
+ something that should have not been sent).
o Add a timeout to handling incoming JOIN commands. It should be
enforced that JOIN command is executed only once in a second or two
each JOIN command will create and distribute the new channel key
to everybody on the channel.
- o New configuration file format must be added. The new one will be
- done using the dotconf config library (lib/dotconf). The following
- tasks relates closely to this as well and must be done at the same time
- when adding the new config file format:
-
- o Server says that it is able to listen on multiple ports but
- currently that is bogus. It can, but internals are for single
- server.
+ o Backup router related issues
- o Protocol execution timeouts are hard coded, should be
- configurable.
+ o Channel user mode changes are notified unnecessarely when
+ switching to backup router on router crash.
- o IP address fields in configuration file should accept mask
- format as well, IP/MASK, and not just plain IP.
+ o Lots of statistics updating is missing around the server.
o If client's public key is saved in the server (and doing public key
authentication) then the hostname and the username information could
TODO/bugs In SILC Libraries
===========================
- o make install copies the symblic links from lib/silcsim/ and not
- modules.
-
o WIN32 silc_net_create_connection_async does not work the same way
than on Unix. Do it with threads on WIN32. The function works but
is not actually async currently.
o Rewrite the lib/silcsim/silcsim.h. The SilcSimContext should be
private and silc_sim_alloc should take necessary arguments.
+ o lib/silcsftp/sftp_fs_memory.c use directly open(), close() etc.
+ routines. Change to use silc_file_* routines.
+
+ o SILC RNG does not implement random seed files, and they should be
+ implemented.
+
+
+TODO in Toolkit Documentation
+=============================
+
+Stuff that needs to be done in order to complete the Tooolkit Reference
+Manual.
+
+ o Lots of ROBOdoc header formatting is undone in lib/silcske,
+ lib/silcutil, and lib/silccrypt.
+
+ o Write "Programming with Toolkit" document, describing how to build
+ Toolkit, how the build system works, where is everything, how
+ new (external) projects can be glued into Toolkit (use irssi as an
+ example), and how external projects can use Toolkit without gluing into
+ it (how to link etc).
+
+ o Write "Programming conventions" document to describe the coding
+ and naming conventions used in the Toolkit (should not be
+ actually the CodingStyle document, but something more general).
+
+ o Move the lib/silccrypt/silcrng.h's "how the RNG works" documentation
+ to its own html file and link it to the reference manual.
+
TODO in SILC Protocol
=====================
new features without always making the command incompatible to previous
version. To be included in protocol version 1.1.
+ 5. Inviting and banning by public key should be made possible. To be
+ included in protocol version 1.x.
+
+ 6. Add perhaps SILENCE_USERS, SILENCE_OPERS channel user modes which
+ can be used to silence (moderate) normal users and opers (this set
+ only by founder). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
+
+ 7. Channel Message Payload needs slight redesining to include the IV
+ field to the MAC generation of the payload. It is authenticated
+ by the packet's MAC but not by the payload's MAC. Since the IV
+ belongs to the payload, its integrity should be protected by the
+ payload MAC and not alone by packet MAC. To be included in protocol
+ version 1.1.
+
+ 8. Remove the administrative commands from the protocol all together.
+ It does not make sense for the protocol to define how a server is
+ reconnected or shutdown, since they are implementation and
+ configuration issues. Besides protocol provides only limited set of
+ administrative commands and cannot define all that one could imagine.
+ To be included in protocol version 1.1.
+
+ 9. Add SILC_MESAGE_FLAG_REPLY for being other side to the
+ SILC_MESSAGE_FLAG_REQUEST. Add generic SILC_MESSAGE_FLAG_DATA, which
+ can include generic payload, which can include generic data. The
+ payload definition is left out for now. To be included in protocol
+ version 1.1.
+
+ 10. Check command reply error status types in various commands,
+ specifically NO_FOPRIV is missing from many commands. To be
+ included in protocol version 1.1.
+
TODO After 1.0
==============
- o Compression routines are missing. The protocol supports packet
- compression thus it must be implemented. SILC Zip API must be
- defined. zlib package is already included into the lib dir (in CVS,
- not in distribution), but it is not used yet, and it requires some
- tweaking on the Makefiles (we want static lib not shared).
+A rough list of stuff that is going to be done to SILC after 1.0 or at
+least could be done.
o Implement the defined SilcDH API. The definition is in
lib/silccrypt/silcdh.h.
- o Add builtin SOCKS and HTTP Proxy support, well the SOCKS at least.
- SILC currently supports SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 but it needs to be compiled
- in separately.
-
o X.509 certificate support. SILC protocol supports certificates and
it would be great to have support for them. This is a big task as
support has to be made for ASN.1 as well. I've looked into OpenSSL
Other package that should be checked is the NSS's X509 library,
which I like more over OpenSSL package.
- o SSH2 public keys support.
+ o SSH2 public keys support, allowing the use of SSH2 public keys in
+ SILC.
- o OpenPGP certificate support.
+ o OpenPGP certificate support, allowing the use of PGP public keys
+ in SILC.
+
+ o Compression routines are missing. The protocol supports packet
+ compression thus it must be implemented. SILC Zip API must be
+ defined.
+
+ o Rewrite the lib/silcutil/silcprotocol.[ch] not to have [un]register
+ functions, but to make it context based all the way. The alloc should
+ take as argument the protocol type and its callback (not only
+ final callback). It is not good that we have now global list of
+ registered protocols.
+
+ o Optimizations in Libraries
+
+ o There is currently three (3) allocations per packet in the
+ silc_packet_receive_process, which is used to process and
+ dispatch all packets in the packet queue to the parser callback
+ function. First allocation is for parse_ctx, second for the
+ SilcPacketContext, and third for packet->buffer where the actual
+ data is saved.
+
+ The parse_ctx allocation can be removed by adding it as a
+ structure to the SilcPacketContext. When the SilcPacketContext
+ is allocated there is space for the parse context already.
+
+ The silc_packet_context_alloc could have a free list of
+ packet contexts. If free packet context is found from the list
+ it is returned instead of allocating a new one. The library
+ could at first allocate them and save them to the free list
+ until enough contexts for smooth processing exists in the list.
+ This would remove a big allocation since the structure is
+ quite big, and even bigger if it would include the parse_ctx.
+
+ The packet->buffer can be optimized too if the SilcBuffer
+ interface would support free lists as well. Maybe such could
+ be done in the same way as for SilcPacketContext. The
+ silc_buffer_alloc would check free list before actually
+ allocating new memory. Since the packets in the SILC protocol
+ usually are about the same size (due to padding) it would be
+ easy to find suitable size buffer from the free list very
+ quickly.
+
+ These naturally cause the overal memory consumption to grow
+ but would take away many allocations that can be done several
+ times in a second.
+
+ o Move the actual file descriptor task callback (the callback that
+ handles the incoming data, outgoing data etc, that is implemnted
+ in server and client separately (silc_server_packet_process and
+ silc_client_packet_proces)) to the low level socket connection
+ handling routines, and create an interface where the application
+ can register a callbacks for incoming data, outoing data and EOF
+ receiving, which the library will call when necessary. This way
+ we can move the data handling in one place.
+
+ o Add silc_id_str2id to accept the destination buffer as argument
+ and thus not require any memory allocation. Same will happen
+ with silc_id_payload_* functions.
+
+ o Remove the `truelen' field from SilcBuffer as it is entirely
+ redundant since we can get the true length of the buffer by
+ doing buffer->end - buffer->header. Add SILC_BUFFER_TRUELEN
+ macro instead. Consider also removing `len' field too since
+ it effectively is buffer->tail - buffer->data, and adding
+ SILC_BUFFER_LEN macro can do the same. These would save
+ totally 8 bytes of memory per buffer.
+
+ Add also perhaps function silc_buffer_alloc_size that would
+ effectively do:
+
+ return silc_buffer_pull_tail(silc_buffer_alloc(size),
+ size);
+
+ to not require the user to give the pull_tail anymore.
+
+ o Optimizations in Server
+
+ o Remove the big switch statement from the function
+ silc_server_packet_parse_type and replace it with predefined
+ table of function pointers where each of the slot in table
+ represents the packet type value.
+
+ Same could be done with notify packets which has big switch
+ statement too. Same kind of table of notify callbacks could be
+ done as well.
+
+ o The parser callback in the server will add a timeout task for
+ all packets. It will require registering and allocating a
+ new task to the SilcSchedule. Maybe, at least, for server
+ and router packets the parser would be called immediately
+ instead of adding it to the scheduler with 0 timeout. It
+ should be analyzed too how slow the task registering process
+ actually is, and find out ways to optimize it.
+
+ o The SERVER_SIGNOFF notify handing is not optimal, because it'll
+ cause sending of multiple SIGNOFF notify's instead of the one
+ SERVER_SIGNOFF notify that the server received. This should be
+ optimized so that the only SERVER_SIGNOFF is sent and not
+ SIGNOFF of notify at all (using SIGNOFF takes the idea about
+ SERVER_SIGNOFF away entirely).
+
+ o Add SilcAsyncOperation to utility library. Any function that takes
+ callback as an argument must return SilcAsyncOperation.
+
+ o Add DSS support.
o Cipher optimizations (asm, that this) at least for i386 would be nice.
+
+ o Add builtin SOCKS and HTTP Proxy support, well the SOCKS at least.
+ SILC currently supports SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 but it needs to be compiled
+ in separately.