+<p>
+SILC provides security services that any other conferencing protocol
+does not offer today. The most popular conferencing service, IRC,
+is entirely insecure. If you need secure place to talk to some people
+or to group of people over the Internet, IRC or any other conferencing
+service, for that matter, cannot be used. Anyone can see the messages
+and their contents in the IRC network. And the most worse case, some
+people is able to change the contents of the messages. Also, all the
+authentication data, such as, passwords are sent plaintext.
+
+<p>
+SILC is a lot more than just about `encrypting the traffic'. That is
+easy enough to do with IRC, SSL and some ad hoc scripts, and even then
+the entire network cannot be secured, only part of it. SILC provides
+security services, such as, sending private messages entirely secure; no
+one can see the message except you and the real receiver of the message.
+SILC also provides same functionality for channels; no one except those
+clients joined to the channel may see the messages destined to the
+channel. Communication between client and server is also secured with
+session keys, and all commands, authentication data (such as passwords etc.)
+and other traffic is entirely secured. The entire network, and all parts
+of it, is secured. This is something that cannot be done currently with
+any other conferencing protocol, even when using the ad hoc scripts. :)
+
+<p>
+SILC has secure key exchange protocol that is used to create the session
+keys for each connection. SILC also provides strong authentication based
+on either passwords or public key authentication. All authentication
+data is always encrypted in the SILC network. All connections has their
+own session keys, all channels has channel specific keys, and all private
+messages can be secured with private message specific keys.
+