1 TODO/bugs in Irssi SILC client
2 ==============================
4 o Fix the silc_channels_join to parse the command like, with fe.
5 silc_parse_command_line, because currently it ignores all options,
6 including passphrase which makes autojoin impossible to +a channels.
7 Other important options are ignored too.
9 o Add local command to switch the channel's private key when channel has
10 several private keys. Currently sending channel messages with many
11 keys is not possible because changing the key is not possible by the
14 o /cumode for unknown nick does not give any error message.
17 TODO/bugs In SILC Client Library
18 ================================
20 o The PRIVATE_MESSAGE_KEY packet is not handled (it is implemented
21 though). This should be added and perhaps new client operation
22 should be added to notify application that it was received and
23 set the key only if application wishes to set (accept the key) it.
25 o Additions to do after protocol version 1.1:
27 o Fix the NICK_CHANGE notify handling not to create new entry
28 for the changed client, but take the nickname from the notify
29 (removes need for resolving as well). Protocol TODO entry 3.
31 o Add support for list of errors in command replies. Protocol
35 TODO/bugs In SILC Server
36 ========================
38 o Configuration file additions:
40 o Add incoming connection frequency, incoming connection frequency
41 for single IP address, key exchange frequency, key exchange
42 frequency for single IP. Add also frequency base.
44 o Add hashed passwords to config file.
46 o Add rehashing support.
48 o Assure that server is allowed to connect only once to router. Meaning
49 if server connection is established already, same connection cannot be
52 o If server send CUMODE_CHANGE notify (like setting founder) to router
53 and router does not have founder on channel (founder is left or there's
54 no founder on channel at all), the router will accept the server's
55 founder mode change, even though it perhaps should not do that.
57 o Make the normal server save user counts with LIST command reply.
59 o The router should check for validity of received notify packets from
60 servers (after all buggy servers may send notify that is actually
61 something that should have not been sent).
63 o Add a timeout to handling incoming JOIN commands. It should be
64 enforced that JOIN command is executed only once in a second or two
65 seconds. Now it is possible to accept n incoming JOIN commands
66 and process them without any timeouts. THis must be employed because
67 each JOIN command will create and distribute the new channel key
68 to everybody on the channel.
70 o Backup router related issues
72 o Channel user mode changes are notified unnecessarely when
73 switching to backup router on router crash.
75 o Lots of statistics updating is missing around the server.
77 o If client's public key is saved in the server (and doing public key
78 authentication) then the hostname and the username information could
79 be taken from the public key. Should be a configuration option!
82 TODO/bugs In SILC Libraries
83 ===========================
85 o WIN32 silc_net_create_connection_async does not work the same way
86 than on Unix. Do it with threads on WIN32. The function works but
87 is not actually async currently.
89 o Rewrite the lib/silcsim/silcsim.h. The SilcSimContext should be
90 private and silc_sim_alloc should take necessary arguments.
92 o lib/silcsftp/sftp_fs_memory.c use directly open(), close() etc.
93 routines. Change to use silc_file_* routines.
95 o SILC RNG does not implement random seed files, and they should be
99 TODO in Toolkit Documentation
100 =============================
102 Stuff that needs to be done in order to complete the Tooolkit Reference
105 o Lots of ROBOdoc header formatting is undone in lib/silcske,
106 lib/silcutil, and lib/silccrypt.
108 o Write "Programming with Toolkit" document, describing how to build
109 Toolkit, how the build system works, where is everything, how
110 new (external) projects can be glued into Toolkit (use irssi as an
111 example), and how external projects can use Toolkit without gluing into
112 it (how to link etc).
114 o Write "Programming conventions" document to describe the coding
115 and naming conventions used in the Toolkit (should not be
116 actually the CodingStyle document, but something more general).
119 TODO in SILC Protocol
120 =====================
122 Current protocol version is 1.0. However, it is far from being perfect,
123 and needs to include additional features. Following protocol TODO entries
124 describe new stuff to be added to protocol versions 1.x.
126 1. Re-define the Status Payload: it is now 16 bits, split it into two
127 8 bits fields. First field includes status types from 0 - 9 and
128 10 - n *if* it is not an list of errors. If it is list of errors then
129 the first field includes 1, 2 and/or 3, and the second field includes
130 the error status 10 - n. This way it is possible to send multiple
131 errors (list of errors) and we have a way to tell the receiver that
132 there will be other errors as well. The second field is used only
133 if there is list of errors. If normal status, or normal (single)
134 error status the second field is set to zero, and must be ignored.
135 Hence, the status works same way as now except for list of errors.
136 To be included in protocol version 1.1.
138 2. Define that WHOIS and IDENTIFY commands must send list of errors
139 if multiple Client ID (or Channel ID and Server ID for IDENTIFY) was
140 requested and was not found. Each unfound entry must cause an error
141 command reply to the sender. Also define that errors must be sent
142 *after* sending successfully found entries (this way receiver may
143 ignore them). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
145 3. Define the NICK_CHANGE notify to send the changed nickname as a new
146 third argument. This will make the NICK_CHANGE notify handling easier
147 in the receiver's end (client primarily) since it removes the
148 requirement that receiver must resolve (using IDENTIFY or WHOIS) the
149 new Client ID received in the notify (because of the new nickname is
150 unknown). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
152 4. Add "request parameters" or similar to the WHOIS command, which can
153 be used to request various parameters (something not returned by
154 standard WHOIS command) about clients (info that could be fetched
155 even from clients). Additional specification (or appendix) should
156 be done to define the payload and the parameters. It could be used
157 to make the WHOIS command support various search conditions as well.
158 This would be the way to extend the WHOIS command to support various
159 new features without always making the command incompatible to previous
160 version. To be included in protocol version 1.1.
162 5. Inviting and banning by public key should be made possible. To be
163 included in protocol version 1.x.
165 6. Add perhaps SILENCE_USERS, SILENCE_OPERS channel user modes which
166 can be used to silence (moderate) normal users and opers (this set
167 only by founder). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
169 7. Channel Message Payload needs slight redesining to include the IV
170 field to the MAC generation of the payload. It is authenticated
171 by the packet's MAC but not by the payload's MAC. Since the IV
172 belongs to the payload, its integrity should be protected by the
173 payload MAC and not alone by packet MAC. To be included in protocol
176 8. Remove the administrative commands from the protocol all together.
177 It does not make sense for the protocol to define how a server is
178 reconnected or shutdown, since they are implementation and
179 configuration issues. Besides protocol provides only limited set of
180 administrative commands and cannot define all that one could imagine.
181 To be included in protocol version 1.1.
183 9. Add SILC_MESAGE_FLAG_REPLY for being other side to the
184 SILC_MESSAGE_FLAG_REQUEST. Add generic SILC_MESSAGE_FLAG_DATA, which
185 can include generic payload, which can include generic data. The
186 payload definition is left out for now. To be included in protocol
189 10. Check command reply error status types in various commands,
190 specifically NO_FOPRIV is missing from many commands. To be
191 included in protocol version 1.1.
197 A rough list of stuff that is going to be done to SILC after 1.0 or at
200 o Implement the defined SilcDH API. The definition is in
201 lib/silccrypt/silcdh.h.
203 o X.509 certificate support. SILC protocol supports certificates and
204 it would be great to have support for them. This is a big task as
205 support has to be made for ASN.1 as well. I've looked into OpenSSL
206 package as it has X.509 certificate support (and ASN.1 as well).
207 The code does not look very good to my eye but it has some potentials.
208 This should be looked at more closely.
210 Naturally own SILC Certificate API has to be defined regardles what
211 the actual X.509 library is (OpenSSL X.509 or something else). Other
212 choice is to write own X.509 library but I'm not going to do it -
213 I can help to migrate the OpenSSL X.509 into SILC and I can help if
214 someone would like to write the X.509 library - but I'm not going
215 to start writing one myself. Anyhow, the OpenSSL X.509 lib should
218 Other package that should be checked is the NSS's X509 library,
219 which I like more over OpenSSL package.
221 o SSH2 public keys support, allowing the use of SSH2 public keys in
224 o OpenPGP certificate support, allowing the use of PGP public keys
227 o Compression routines are missing. The protocol supports packet
228 compression thus it must be implemented. SILC Zip API must be
231 o Rewrite the lib/silcutil/silcprotocol.[ch] not to have [un]register
232 functions, but to make it context based all the way. The alloc should
233 take as argument the protocol type and its callback (not only
234 final callback). It is not good that we have now global list of
235 registered protocols.
237 o Optimizations in Libraries
239 o There is currently three (3) allocations per packet in the
240 silc_packet_receive_process, which is used to process and
241 dispatch all packets in the packet queue to the parser callback
242 function. First allocation is for parse_ctx, second for the
243 SilcPacketContext, and third for packet->buffer where the actual
246 The parse_ctx allocation can be removed by adding it as a
247 structure to the SilcPacketContext. When the SilcPacketContext
248 is allocated there is space for the parse context already.
250 The silc_packet_context_alloc could have a free list of
251 packet contexts. If free packet context is found from the list
252 it is returned instead of allocating a new one. The library
253 could at first allocate them and save them to the free list
254 until enough contexts for smooth processing exists in the list.
255 This would remove a big allocation since the structure is
256 quite big, and even bigger if it would include the parse_ctx.
258 The packet->buffer can be optimized too if the SilcBuffer
259 interface would support free lists as well. Maybe such could
260 be done in the same way as for SilcPacketContext. The
261 silc_buffer_alloc would check free list before actually
262 allocating new memory. Since the packets in the SILC protocol
263 usually are about the same size (due to padding) it would be
264 easy to find suitable size buffer from the free list very
267 These naturally cause the overal memory consumption to grow
268 but would take away many allocations that can be done several
271 o Move the actual file descriptor task callback (the callback that
272 handles the incoming data, outgoing data etc, that is implemnted
273 in server and client separately (silc_server_packet_process and
274 silc_client_packet_proces)) to the low level socket connection
275 handling routines, and create an interface where the application
276 can register a callbacks for incoming data, outoing data and EOF
277 receiving, which the library will call when necessary. This way
278 we can move the data handling in one place.
280 o Add silc_id_str2id to accept the destination buffer as argument
281 and thus not require any memory allocation. Same will happen
282 with silc_id_payload_* functions.
284 o Remove the `truelen' field from SilcBuffer as it is entirely
285 redundant since we can get the true length of the buffer by
286 doing buffer->end - buffer->header. Add SILC_BUFFER_TRUELEN
287 macro instead. Consider also removing `len' field too since
288 it effectively is buffer->tail - buffer->data, and adding
289 SILC_BUFFER_LEN macro can do the same. These would save
290 totally 8 bytes of memory per buffer.
292 Add also perhaps function silc_buffer_alloc_size that would
295 return silc_buffer_pull_tail(silc_buffer_alloc(size),
298 to not require the user to give the pull_tail anymore.
300 o Optimizations in Server
302 o Remove the big switch statement from the function
303 silc_server_packet_parse_type and replace it with predefined
304 table of function pointers where each of the slot in table
305 represents the packet type value.
307 Same could be done with notify packets which has big switch
308 statement too. Same kind of table of notify callbacks could be
311 o The parser callback in the server will add a timeout task for
312 all packets. It will require registering and allocating a
313 new task to the SilcSchedule. Maybe, at least, for server
314 and router packets the parser would be called immediately
315 instead of adding it to the scheduler with 0 timeout. It
316 should be analyzed too how slow the task registering process
317 actually is, and find out ways to optimize it.
319 o The SERVER_SIGNOFF notify handing is not optimal, because it'll
320 cause sending of multiple SIGNOFF notify's instead of the one
321 SERVER_SIGNOFF notify that the server received. This should be
322 optimized so that the only SERVER_SIGNOFF is sent and not
323 SIGNOFF of notify at all (using SIGNOFF takes the idea about
324 SERVER_SIGNOFF away entirely).
326 o Add SilcAsyncOperation to utility library. Any function that takes
327 callback as an argument must return SilcAsyncOperation.
331 o Cipher optimizations (asm, that this) at least for i386 would be nice.
333 o Add builtin SOCKS and HTTP Proxy support, well the SOCKS at least.
334 SILC currently supports SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 but it needs to be compiled