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 Add hashed passwords to silcd.conf file.
53 o Backup router related issues
55 o Channel user mode changes are notified unnecessarely when
56 switching to backup router on router crash.
58 o Add a timeout to handling incoming JOIN commands. It should be
59 enforced that JOIN command is executed only once in a second or two
60 seconds. Now it is possible to accept n incoming JOIN commands
61 and process them without any timeouts. THis must be employed because
62 each JOIN command will create and distribute the new channel key
63 to everybody on the channel.
65 o New configuration file format must be added. The new one will be
66 done using the dotconf config library (lib/dotconf). The following
67 tasks relates closely to this as well and must be done at the same time
68 when adding the new config file format:
70 o Server says that it is able to listen on multiple ports but
71 currently that is bogus. It can, but internals are for single
74 o Protocol execution timeouts are hard coded, should be
77 o IP address fields in configuration file should accept mask
78 format as well, IP/MASK, and not just plain IP.
80 o If client's public key is saved in the server (and doing public key
81 authentication) then the hostname and the username information could
82 be taken from the public key. Should be a configuration option!
85 TODO/bugs In SILC Libraries
86 ===========================
88 o WIN32 silc_net_create_connection_async does not work the same way
89 than on Unix. Do it with threads on WIN32. The function works but
90 is not actually async currently.
92 o Rewrite the lib/silcsim/silcsim.h. The SilcSimContext should be
93 private and silc_sim_alloc should take necessary arguments.
99 Current protocol version is 1.0. However, it is far from being perfect,
100 and needs to include additional features. Following protocol TODO entries
101 describe new stuff to be added to protocol versions 1.x.
103 1. Re-define the Status Payload: it is now 16 bits, split it into two
104 8 bits fields. First field includes status types from 0 - 9 and
105 10 - n *if* it is not an list of errors. If it is list of errors then
106 the first field includes 1, 2 and/or 3, and the second field includes
107 the error status 10 - n. This way it is possible to send multiple
108 errors (list of errors) and we have a way to tell the receiver that
109 there will be other errors as well. The second field is used only
110 if there is list of errors. If normal status, or normal (single)
111 error status the second field is set to zero, and must be ignored.
112 Hence, the status works same way as now except for list of errors.
113 To be included in protocol version 1.1.
115 2. Define that WHOIS and IDENTIFY commands must send list of errors
116 if multiple Client ID (or Channel ID and Server ID for IDENTIFY) was
117 requested and was not found. Each unfound entry must cause an error
118 command reply to the sender. Also define that errors must be sent
119 *after* sending successfully found entries (this way receiver may
120 ignore them). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
122 3. Define the NICK_CHANGE notify to send the changed nickname as a new
123 third argument. This will make the NICK_CHANGE notify handling easier
124 in the receiver's end (client primarily) since it removes the
125 requirement that receiver must resolve (using IDENTIFY or WHOIS) the
126 new Client ID received in the notify (because of the new nickname is
127 unknown). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
129 4. Add "request parameters" or similar to the WHOIS command, which can
130 be used to request various parameters (something not returned by
131 standard WHOIS command) about clients (info that could be fetched
132 even from clients). Additional specification (or appendix) should
133 be done to define the payload and the parameters. It could be used
134 to make the WHOIS command support various search conditions as well.
135 This would be the way to extend the WHOIS command to support various
136 new features without always making the command incompatible to previous
137 version. To be included in protocol version 1.1.
139 5. Inviting and banning by public key should be made possible. To be
140 included in protocol version 1.x.
142 6. Add perhaps SILENCE_USERS, SILENCE_OPERS channel user modes which
143 can be used to silence (moderate) normal users and opers (this set
144 only by founder). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
146 7. Channel Message Payload needs slight redesining to include the IV
147 field to the MAC generation of the payload. It is authenticated
148 by the packet's MAC but not by the payload's MAC. Since the IV
149 belongs to the payload, its integrity should be protected by the
150 payload MAC and not alone by packet MAC. To be included in protocol
153 8. Remove the administrative commands from the protocol all together.
154 It does not make sense for the protocol to define how a server is
155 reconnected or shutdown, since they are implementation and
156 configuration issues. Besides protocol provides only limited set of
157 administrative commands and cannot define all that one could imagine.
158 To be included in protocol version 1.1.
164 A rough list of stuff that is going to be done to SILC after 1.0 or at
167 o Implement the defined SilcDH API. The definition is in
168 lib/silccrypt/silcdh.h.
170 o X.509 certificate support. SILC protocol supports certificates and
171 it would be great to have support for them. This is a big task as
172 support has to be made for ASN.1 as well. I've looked into OpenSSL
173 package as it has X.509 certificate support (and ASN.1 as well).
174 The code does not look very good to my eye but it has some potentials.
175 This should be looked at more closely.
177 Naturally own SILC Certificate API has to be defined regardles what
178 the actual X.509 library is (OpenSSL X.509 or something else). Other
179 choice is to write own X.509 library but I'm not going to do it -
180 I can help to migrate the OpenSSL X.509 into SILC and I can help if
181 someone would like to write the X.509 library - but I'm not going
182 to start writing one myself. Anyhow, the OpenSSL X.509 lib should
185 Other package that should be checked is the NSS's X509 library,
186 which I like more over OpenSSL package.
188 o SSH2 public keys support, allowing the use of SSH2 public keys in
191 o OpenPGP certificate support, allowing the use of PGP public keys
194 o Compression routines are missing. The protocol supports packet
195 compression thus it must be implemented. SILC Zip API must be
198 o Rewrite the lib/silcutil/silcprotocol.[ch] not to have [un]register
199 functions, but to make it context based all the way. The alloc should
200 take as argument the protocol type and its callback (not only
201 final callback). It is not good that we have now global list of
202 registered protocols.
204 o Optimizations in Libraries
206 o There is currently three (3) allocations per packet in the
207 silc_packet_receive_process, which is used to process and
208 dispatch all packets in the packet queue to the parser callback
209 function. First allocation is for parse_ctx, second for the
210 SilcPacketContext, and third for packet->buffer where the actual
213 The parse_ctx allocation can be removed by adding it as a
214 structure to the SilcPacketContext. When the SilcPacketContext
215 is allocated there is space for the parse context already.
217 The silc_packet_context_alloc could have a free list of
218 packet contexts. If free packet context is found from the list
219 it is returned instead of allocating a new one. The library
220 could at first allocate them and save them to the free list
221 until enough contexts for smooth processing exists in the list.
222 This would remove a big allocation since the structure is
223 quite big, and even bigger if it would include the parse_ctx.
225 The packet->buffer can be optimized too if the SilcBuffer
226 interface would support free lists as well. Maybe such could
227 be done in the same way as for SilcPacketContext. The
228 silc_buffer_alloc would check free list before actually
229 allocating new memory. Since the packets in the SILC protocol
230 usually are about the same size (due to padding) it would be
231 easy to find suitable size buffer from the free list very
234 These naturally cause the overal memory consumption to grow
235 but would take away many allocations that can be done several
238 o Move the actual file descriptor task callback (the callback that
239 handles the incoming data, outgoing data etc, that is implemnted
240 in server and client separately (silc_server_packet_process and
241 silc_client_packet_proces)) to the low level socket connection
242 handling routines, and create an interface where the application
243 can register a callbacks for incoming data, outoing data and EOF
244 receiving, which the library will call when necessary. This way
245 we can move the data handling in one place.
247 o Add silc_id_str2id to accept the destination buffer as argument
248 and thus not require any memory allocation. Same will happen
249 with silc_id_payload_* functions.
251 o Optimizations in Server
253 o Remove the big switch statement from the function
254 silc_server_packet_parse_type and replace it with predefined
255 table of function pointers where each of the slot in table
256 represents the packet type value.
258 Same could be done with notify packets which has big switch
259 statement too. Same kind of table of notify callbacks could be
262 o The parser callback in the server will add a timeout task for
263 all packets. It will require registering and allocating a
264 new task to the SilcSchedule. Maybe, at least, for server
265 and router packets the parser would be called immediately
266 instead of adding it to the scheduler with 0 timeout. It
267 should be analyzed too how slow the task registering process
268 actually is, and find out ways to optimize it.
270 o Add SilcAsyncOperation to utility library.
272 o Cipher optimizations (asm, that this) at least for i386 would be nice.
274 o Add builtin SOCKS and HTTP Proxy support, well the SOCKS at least.
275 SILC currently supports SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 but it needs to be compiled