1 TODO/bugs in Irssi SILC client
2 ==============================
4 o Rewrite the notify handling in the new Irssi SILC client.
6 o /cumode for unknown nick does not give any error message.
8 o Add local command to switch the channel's private key when channel has
9 several private keys. Currently sending channel messages with many
10 keys is not possible because changing the key is not possible by the
13 o JOINing to +a (requires passphrase to JOIN) does not work on autojoin.
14 Seems the passwords in the .silc/config has no effect.
16 o Add local commands to list the current server and client public keys
17 that the user has. And a local command to dump the contents of the
18 public key to the screen. Something like LISTKEYS, SHOWKEY...
21 TODO/bugs In SILC Client Library
22 ================================
24 o The PRIVATE_MESSAGE_KEY packet is not handled (it is implemented
25 though). This should be added and perhaps new client operation
26 should be added to notify application that it was received and
27 set the key only if application wishes to set (accept the key) it.
29 o Additions to do after protocol version 1.1:
31 o Fix the NICK_CHANGE notify handling not to create new entry
32 for the changed client, but take the nickname from the notify
33 (removes need for resolving as well). Protocol TODO entry 3.
35 o Add support for list of errors in command replies. Protocol
39 TODO/bugs In SILC Server
40 ========================
42 o The accept_new_connection_final for router/server is broken. See XXX.
44 o Configuration file additions:
46 o Allow configuration of protocol execution timeouts. This
47 includes SKE, CONN_AUTH and REKEY timeouts.
49 o Add require_reverse_lookup boolean to set whether require
50 reverse lookups for hostnames and IPs.
52 o IP address fields in configuration file should accept mask
53 format as well, IP/MASK, and not just plain IP. This would
54 allow subnet filtering etc.
56 o Implement Classes (or Params) for connections.
58 o Add also default keepalive etc. settings to General (can default
59 when Classes are not used.
61 o Add channel key rekey default timeout.
63 o Add reconnection retry count, internal, max timeout, and
64 whether to keep trying or not.
66 o Add (advanced options in General) to set how often certain ID
69 o Add hashed passwords to config file.
71 o Assure that server is allowed to connect only once to router. Meaning
72 if server connection is established already, same connection cannot be
75 o If server send CUMODE_CHANGE notify (like setting founder) to router
76 and router does not have founder on channel (founder is left or there's
77 no founder on channel at all), the router will accept the server's
78 founder mode change, even though it perhaps should not do that.
80 o Make the normal server save user counts with LIST command reply.
82 o The router should check for validity of received notify packets from
83 servers (after all buggy servers may send notify that is actually
84 something that should have not been sent).
86 o Add a timeout to handling incoming JOIN commands. It should be
87 enforced that JOIN command is executed only once in a second or two
88 seconds. Now it is possible to accept n incoming JOIN commands
89 and process them without any timeouts. THis must be employed because
90 each JOIN command will create and distribute the new channel key
91 to everybody on the channel.
93 o Backup router related issues
95 o Channel user mode changes are notified unnecessarely when
96 switching to backup router on router crash.
98 o Lots of statistics updating is missing around the server.
100 o If client's public key is saved in the server (and doing public key
101 authentication) then the hostname and the username information could
102 be taken from the public key. Should be a configuration option!
105 TODO/bugs In SILC Libraries
106 ===========================
108 o WIN32 silc_net_create_connection_async does not work the same way
109 than on Unix. Do it with threads on WIN32. The function works but
110 is not actually async currently.
112 o Rewrite the lib/silcsim/silcsim.h. The SilcSimContext should be
113 private and silc_sim_alloc should take necessary arguments.
115 o lib/silcsftp/sftp_fs_memory.c use directly open(), close() etc.
116 routines. Change to use silc_file_* routines.
118 o SILC RNG does not implement random seed files, and they should be
122 TODO in Toolkit Documentation
123 =============================
125 Stuff that needs to be done in order to complete the Tooolkit Reference
128 o Lots of ROBOdoc header formatting is undone in lib/silcske,
129 lib/silcutil, and lib/silccrypt.
131 o Write "Programming with Toolkit" document, describing how to build
132 Toolkit, how the build system works, where is everything, how
133 new (external) projects can be glued into Toolkit (use irssi as an
134 example), and how external projects can use Toolkit without gluing into
135 it (how to link etc).
137 o Write "Programming conventions" document to describe the coding
138 and naming conventions used in the Toolkit (should not be
139 actually the CodingStyle document, but something more general).
141 o Move the lib/silccrypt/silcrng.h's "how the RNG works" documentation
142 to its own html file and link it to the reference manual.
145 TODO in SILC Protocol
146 =====================
148 Current protocol version is 1.0. However, it is far from being perfect,
149 and needs to include additional features. Following protocol TODO entries
150 describe new stuff to be added to protocol versions 1.x.
152 1. Re-define the Status Payload: it is now 16 bits, split it into two
153 8 bits fields. First field includes status types from 0 - 9 and
154 10 - n *if* it is not an list of errors. If it is list of errors then
155 the first field includes 1, 2 and/or 3, and the second field includes
156 the error status 10 - n. This way it is possible to send multiple
157 errors (list of errors) and we have a way to tell the receiver that
158 there will be other errors as well. The second field is used only
159 if there is list of errors. If normal status, or normal (single)
160 error status the second field is set to zero, and must be ignored.
161 Hence, the status works same way as now except for list of errors.
162 To be included in protocol version 1.1.
164 2. Define that WHOIS and IDENTIFY commands must send list of errors
165 if multiple Client ID (or Channel ID and Server ID for IDENTIFY) was
166 requested and was not found. Each unfound entry must cause an error
167 command reply to the sender. Also define that errors must be sent
168 *after* sending successfully found entries (this way receiver may
169 ignore them). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
171 3. Define the NICK_CHANGE notify to send the changed nickname as a new
172 third argument. This will make the NICK_CHANGE notify handling easier
173 in the receiver's end (client primarily) since it removes the
174 requirement that receiver must resolve (using IDENTIFY or WHOIS) the
175 new Client ID received in the notify (because of the new nickname is
176 unknown). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
178 4. Add "request parameters" or similar to the WHOIS command, which can
179 be used to request various parameters (something not returned by
180 standard WHOIS command) about clients (info that could be fetched
181 even from clients). Additional specification (or appendix) should
182 be done to define the payload and the parameters. It could be used
183 to make the WHOIS command support various search conditions as well.
184 This would be the way to extend the WHOIS command to support various
185 new features without always making the command incompatible to previous
186 version. To be included in protocol version 1.1.
188 5. Inviting and banning by public key should be made possible. To be
189 included in protocol version 1.x.
191 6. Add perhaps SILENCE_USERS, SILENCE_OPERS channel user modes which
192 can be used to silence (moderate) normal users and opers (this set
193 only by founder). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
195 7. Channel Message Payload needs slight redesining to include the IV
196 field to the MAC generation of the payload. It is authenticated
197 by the packet's MAC but not by the payload's MAC. Since the IV
198 belongs to the payload, its integrity should be protected by the
199 payload MAC and not alone by packet MAC. To be included in protocol
202 8. Remove the administrative commands from the protocol all together.
203 It does not make sense for the protocol to define how a server is
204 reconnected or shutdown, since they are implementation and
205 configuration issues. Besides protocol provides only limited set of
206 administrative commands and cannot define all that one could imagine.
207 To be included in protocol version 1.1.
209 9. Add SILC_MESAGE_FLAG_REPLY for being other side to the
210 SILC_MESSAGE_FLAG_REQUEST. Add generic SILC_MESSAGE_FLAG_DATA, which
211 can include generic payload, which can include generic data. The
212 payload definition is left out for now. To be included in protocol
215 10. Check command reply error status types in various commands,
216 specifically NO_FOPRIV is missing from many commands. To be
217 included in protocol version 1.1.
223 A rough list of stuff that is going to be done to SILC after 1.0 or at
226 o Implement the defined SilcDH API. The definition is in
227 lib/silccrypt/silcdh.h.
229 o X.509 certificate support. SILC protocol supports certificates and
230 it would be great to have support for them. This is a big task as
231 support has to be made for ASN.1 as well. I've looked into OpenSSL
232 package as it has X.509 certificate support (and ASN.1 as well).
233 The code does not look very good to my eye but it has some potentials.
234 This should be looked at more closely.
236 Naturally own SILC Certificate API has to be defined regardles what
237 the actual X.509 library is (OpenSSL X.509 or something else). Other
238 choice is to write own X.509 library but I'm not going to do it -
239 I can help to migrate the OpenSSL X.509 into SILC and I can help if
240 someone would like to write the X.509 library - but I'm not going
241 to start writing one myself. Anyhow, the OpenSSL X.509 lib should
244 Other package that should be checked is the NSS's X509 library,
245 which I like more over OpenSSL package.
247 o SSH2 public keys support, allowing the use of SSH2 public keys in
250 o OpenPGP certificate support, allowing the use of PGP public keys
253 o Compression routines are missing. The protocol supports packet
254 compression thus it must be implemented. SILC Zip API must be
257 o Rewrite the lib/silcutil/silcprotocol.[ch] not to have [un]register
258 functions, but to make it context based all the way. The alloc should
259 take as argument the protocol type and its callback (not only
260 final callback). It is not good that we have now global list of
261 registered protocols.
263 o Optimizations in Libraries
265 o There is currently three (3) allocations per packet in the
266 silc_packet_receive_process, which is used to process and
267 dispatch all packets in the packet queue to the parser callback
268 function. First allocation is for parse_ctx, second for the
269 SilcPacketContext, and third for packet->buffer where the actual
272 The parse_ctx allocation can be removed by adding it as a
273 structure to the SilcPacketContext. When the SilcPacketContext
274 is allocated there is space for the parse context already.
276 The silc_packet_context_alloc could have a free list of
277 packet contexts. If free packet context is found from the list
278 it is returned instead of allocating a new one. The library
279 could at first allocate them and save them to the free list
280 until enough contexts for smooth processing exists in the list.
281 This would remove a big allocation since the structure is
282 quite big, and even bigger if it would include the parse_ctx.
284 The packet->buffer can be optimized too if the SilcBuffer
285 interface would support free lists as well. Maybe such could
286 be done in the same way as for SilcPacketContext. The
287 silc_buffer_alloc would check free list before actually
288 allocating new memory. Since the packets in the SILC protocol
289 usually are about the same size (due to padding) it would be
290 easy to find suitable size buffer from the free list very
293 These naturally cause the overal memory consumption to grow
294 but would take away many allocations that can be done several
297 o Move the actual file descriptor task callback (the callback that
298 handles the incoming data, outgoing data etc, that is implemnted
299 in server and client separately (silc_server_packet_process and
300 silc_client_packet_proces)) to the low level socket connection
301 handling routines, and create an interface where the application
302 can register a callbacks for incoming data, outoing data and EOF
303 receiving, which the library will call when necessary. This way
304 we can move the data handling in one place.
306 o Add silc_id_str2id to accept the destination buffer as argument
307 and thus not require any memory allocation. Same will happen
308 with silc_id_payload_* functions.
310 o Remove the `truelen' field from SilcBuffer as it is entirely
311 redundant since we can get the true length of the buffer by
312 doing buffer->end - buffer->header. Add SILC_BUFFER_TRUELEN
313 macro instead. Consider also removing `len' field too since
314 it effectively is buffer->tail - buffer->data, and adding
315 SILC_BUFFER_LEN macro can do the same. These would save
316 totally 8 bytes of memory per buffer.
318 Add also perhaps function silc_buffer_alloc_size that would
321 return silc_buffer_pull_tail(silc_buffer_alloc(size),
324 to not require the user to give the pull_tail anymore.
326 o Optimizations in Server
328 o Remove the big switch statement from the function
329 silc_server_packet_parse_type and replace it with predefined
330 table of function pointers where each of the slot in table
331 represents the packet type value.
333 Same could be done with notify packets which has big switch
334 statement too. Same kind of table of notify callbacks could be
337 o The parser callback in the server will add a timeout task for
338 all packets. It will require registering and allocating a
339 new task to the SilcSchedule. Maybe, at least, for server
340 and router packets the parser would be called immediately
341 instead of adding it to the scheduler with 0 timeout. It
342 should be analyzed too how slow the task registering process
343 actually is, and find out ways to optimize it.
345 o The SERVER_SIGNOFF notify handing is not optimal, because it'll
346 cause sending of multiple SIGNOFF notify's instead of the one
347 SERVER_SIGNOFF notify that the server received. This should be
348 optimized so that the only SERVER_SIGNOFF is sent and not
349 SIGNOFF of notify at all (using SIGNOFF takes the idea about
350 SERVER_SIGNOFF away entirely).
352 o Add SilcAsyncOperation to utility library. Any function that takes
353 callback as an argument must return SilcAsyncOperation.
357 o Cipher optimizations (asm, that this) at least for i386 would be nice.
359 o Add builtin SOCKS and HTTP Proxy support, well the SOCKS at least.
360 SILC currently supports SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 but it needs to be compiled