1 TODO/bugs in Irssi SILC client
2 ==============================
4 o When autoconnect="yes" is set in silc.conf the irssi complains about
7 o Rewrite the notify handling in the new Irssi SILC client.
9 o /cumode for unknown nick does not give any error message.
11 o Add local command to switch the channel's private key when channel has
12 several private keys. Currently sending channel messages with many
13 keys is not possible because changing the key is not possible by the
16 o JOINing to +a (requires passphrase to JOIN) does not work on autojoin.
17 Seems the passwords in the .silc/config has no effect.
19 o Add local commands to list the current server and client public keys
20 that the user has. And a local command to dump the contents of the
21 public key to the screen. Something like LISTKEYS, SHOWKEY...
24 TODO/bugs In SILC Client Library
25 ================================
27 o The PRIVATE_MESSAGE_KEY packet is not handled (it is implemented
28 though). This should be added and perhaps new client operation
29 should be added to notify application that it was received and
30 set the key only if application wishes to set (accept the key) it.
32 o Additions to do after protocol version 1.1:
34 o Fix the NICK_CHANGE notify handling not to create new entry
35 for the changed client, but take the nickname from the notify
36 (removes need for resolving as well). Protocol TODO entry 3.
38 o Add support for list of errors in command replies. Protocol
42 TODO/bugs In SILC Server
43 ========================
45 o Configuration file additions:
47 o Allow configuration of protocol execution timeouts. This
48 includes SKE, CONN_AUTH and REKEY timeouts. Check all
49 "XXX hardcoded" from the code for these.
51 o IP address fields in configuration file should accept mask
52 format as well, IP/MASK, and not just plain IP. This would
53 allow subnet filtering etc.
55 o Add channel key rekey default timeout.
57 o Add (advanced options in General) to set how often certain ID
58 caches are purged (could be used to optimize the server's
61 o Add hashed passwords to config file.
63 o Add rehashing support.
65 o Assure that server is allowed to connect only once to router. Meaning
66 if server connection is established already, same connection cannot be
69 o If server send CUMODE_CHANGE notify (like setting founder) to router
70 and router does not have founder on channel (founder is left or there's
71 no founder on channel at all), the router will accept the server's
72 founder mode change, even though it perhaps should not do that.
74 o Make the normal server save user counts with LIST command reply.
76 o The router should check for validity of received notify packets from
77 servers (after all buggy servers may send notify that is actually
78 something that should have not been sent).
80 o Add a timeout to handling incoming JOIN commands. It should be
81 enforced that JOIN command is executed only once in a second or two
82 seconds. Now it is possible to accept n incoming JOIN commands
83 and process them without any timeouts. THis must be employed because
84 each JOIN command will create and distribute the new channel key
85 to everybody on the channel.
87 o Backup router related issues
89 o Channel user mode changes are notified unnecessarely when
90 switching to backup router on router crash.
92 o Lots of statistics updating is missing around the server.
94 o If client's public key is saved in the server (and doing public key
95 authentication) then the hostname and the username information could
96 be taken from the public key. Should be a configuration option!
99 TODO/bugs In SILC Libraries
100 ===========================
102 o WIN32 silc_net_create_connection_async does not work the same way
103 than on Unix. Do it with threads on WIN32. The function works but
104 is not actually async currently.
106 o Rewrite the lib/silcsim/silcsim.h. The SilcSimContext should be
107 private and silc_sim_alloc should take necessary arguments.
109 o lib/silcsftp/sftp_fs_memory.c use directly open(), close() etc.
110 routines. Change to use silc_file_* routines.
112 o SILC RNG does not implement random seed files, and they should be
116 TODO in Toolkit Documentation
117 =============================
119 Stuff that needs to be done in order to complete the Tooolkit Reference
122 o Lots of ROBOdoc header formatting is undone in lib/silcske,
123 lib/silcutil, and lib/silccrypt.
125 o Write "Programming with Toolkit" document, describing how to build
126 Toolkit, how the build system works, where is everything, how
127 new (external) projects can be glued into Toolkit (use irssi as an
128 example), and how external projects can use Toolkit without gluing into
129 it (how to link etc).
131 o Write "Programming conventions" document to describe the coding
132 and naming conventions used in the Toolkit (should not be
133 actually the CodingStyle document, but something more general).
135 o Move the lib/silccrypt/silcrng.h's "how the RNG works" documentation
136 to its own html file and link it to the reference manual.
139 TODO in SILC Protocol
140 =====================
142 Current protocol version is 1.0. However, it is far from being perfect,
143 and needs to include additional features. Following protocol TODO entries
144 describe new stuff to be added to protocol versions 1.x.
146 1. Re-define the Status Payload: it is now 16 bits, split it into two
147 8 bits fields. First field includes status types from 0 - 9 and
148 10 - n *if* it is not an list of errors. If it is list of errors then
149 the first field includes 1, 2 and/or 3, and the second field includes
150 the error status 10 - n. This way it is possible to send multiple
151 errors (list of errors) and we have a way to tell the receiver that
152 there will be other errors as well. The second field is used only
153 if there is list of errors. If normal status, or normal (single)
154 error status the second field is set to zero, and must be ignored.
155 Hence, the status works same way as now except for list of errors.
156 To be included in protocol version 1.1.
158 2. Define that WHOIS and IDENTIFY commands must send list of errors
159 if multiple Client ID (or Channel ID and Server ID for IDENTIFY) was
160 requested and was not found. Each unfound entry must cause an error
161 command reply to the sender. Also define that errors must be sent
162 *after* sending successfully found entries (this way receiver may
163 ignore them). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
165 3. Define the NICK_CHANGE notify to send the changed nickname as a new
166 third argument. This will make the NICK_CHANGE notify handling easier
167 in the receiver's end (client primarily) since it removes the
168 requirement that receiver must resolve (using IDENTIFY or WHOIS) the
169 new Client ID received in the notify (because of the new nickname is
170 unknown). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
172 4. Add "request parameters" or similar to the WHOIS command, which can
173 be used to request various parameters (something not returned by
174 standard WHOIS command) about clients (info that could be fetched
175 even from clients). Additional specification (or appendix) should
176 be done to define the payload and the parameters. It could be used
177 to make the WHOIS command support various search conditions as well.
178 This would be the way to extend the WHOIS command to support various
179 new features without always making the command incompatible to previous
180 version. To be included in protocol version 1.1.
182 5. Inviting and banning by public key should be made possible. To be
183 included in protocol version 1.x.
185 6. Add perhaps SILENCE_USERS, SILENCE_OPERS channel user modes which
186 can be used to silence (moderate) normal users and opers (this set
187 only by founder). To be included in protocol version 1.1.
189 7. Channel Message Payload needs slight redesining to include the IV
190 field to the MAC generation of the payload. It is authenticated
191 by the packet's MAC but not by the payload's MAC. Since the IV
192 belongs to the payload, its integrity should be protected by the
193 payload MAC and not alone by packet MAC. To be included in protocol
196 8. Remove the administrative commands from the protocol all together.
197 It does not make sense for the protocol to define how a server is
198 reconnected or shutdown, since they are implementation and
199 configuration issues. Besides protocol provides only limited set of
200 administrative commands and cannot define all that one could imagine.
201 To be included in protocol version 1.1.
203 9. Add SILC_MESAGE_FLAG_REPLY for being other side to the
204 SILC_MESSAGE_FLAG_REQUEST. Add generic SILC_MESSAGE_FLAG_DATA, which
205 can include generic payload, which can include generic data. The
206 payload definition is left out for now. To be included in protocol
209 10. Check command reply error status types in various commands,
210 specifically NO_FOPRIV is missing from many commands. To be
211 included in protocol version 1.1.
217 A rough list of stuff that is going to be done to SILC after 1.0 or at
220 o Implement the defined SilcDH API. The definition is in
221 lib/silccrypt/silcdh.h.
223 o X.509 certificate support. SILC protocol supports certificates and
224 it would be great to have support for them. This is a big task as
225 support has to be made for ASN.1 as well. I've looked into OpenSSL
226 package as it has X.509 certificate support (and ASN.1 as well).
227 The code does not look very good to my eye but it has some potentials.
228 This should be looked at more closely.
230 Naturally own SILC Certificate API has to be defined regardles what
231 the actual X.509 library is (OpenSSL X.509 or something else). Other
232 choice is to write own X.509 library but I'm not going to do it -
233 I can help to migrate the OpenSSL X.509 into SILC and I can help if
234 someone would like to write the X.509 library - but I'm not going
235 to start writing one myself. Anyhow, the OpenSSL X.509 lib should
238 Other package that should be checked is the NSS's X509 library,
239 which I like more over OpenSSL package.
241 o SSH2 public keys support, allowing the use of SSH2 public keys in
244 o OpenPGP certificate support, allowing the use of PGP public keys
247 o Compression routines are missing. The protocol supports packet
248 compression thus it must be implemented. SILC Zip API must be
251 o Rewrite the lib/silcutil/silcprotocol.[ch] not to have [un]register
252 functions, but to make it context based all the way. The alloc should
253 take as argument the protocol type and its callback (not only
254 final callback). It is not good that we have now global list of
255 registered protocols.
257 o Optimizations in Libraries
259 o There is currently three (3) allocations per packet in the
260 silc_packet_receive_process, which is used to process and
261 dispatch all packets in the packet queue to the parser callback
262 function. First allocation is for parse_ctx, second for the
263 SilcPacketContext, and third for packet->buffer where the actual
266 The parse_ctx allocation can be removed by adding it as a
267 structure to the SilcPacketContext. When the SilcPacketContext
268 is allocated there is space for the parse context already.
270 The silc_packet_context_alloc could have a free list of
271 packet contexts. If free packet context is found from the list
272 it is returned instead of allocating a new one. The library
273 could at first allocate them and save them to the free list
274 until enough contexts for smooth processing exists in the list.
275 This would remove a big allocation since the structure is
276 quite big, and even bigger if it would include the parse_ctx.
278 The packet->buffer can be optimized too if the SilcBuffer
279 interface would support free lists as well. Maybe such could
280 be done in the same way as for SilcPacketContext. The
281 silc_buffer_alloc would check free list before actually
282 allocating new memory. Since the packets in the SILC protocol
283 usually are about the same size (due to padding) it would be
284 easy to find suitable size buffer from the free list very
287 These naturally cause the overal memory consumption to grow
288 but would take away many allocations that can be done several
291 o Move the actual file descriptor task callback (the callback that
292 handles the incoming data, outgoing data etc, that is implemnted
293 in server and client separately (silc_server_packet_process and
294 silc_client_packet_proces)) to the low level socket connection
295 handling routines, and create an interface where the application
296 can register a callbacks for incoming data, outoing data and EOF
297 receiving, which the library will call when necessary. This way
298 we can move the data handling in one place.
300 o Add silc_id_str2id to accept the destination buffer as argument
301 and thus not require any memory allocation. Same will happen
302 with silc_id_payload_* functions.
304 o Remove the `truelen' field from SilcBuffer as it is entirely
305 redundant since we can get the true length of the buffer by
306 doing buffer->end - buffer->header. Add SILC_BUFFER_TRUELEN
307 macro instead. Consider also removing `len' field too since
308 it effectively is buffer->tail - buffer->data, and adding
309 SILC_BUFFER_LEN macro can do the same. These would save
310 totally 8 bytes of memory per buffer.
312 Add also perhaps function silc_buffer_alloc_size that would
315 return silc_buffer_pull_tail(silc_buffer_alloc(size),
318 to not require the user to give the pull_tail anymore.
320 o Optimizations in Server
322 o Remove the big switch statement from the function
323 silc_server_packet_parse_type and replace it with predefined
324 table of function pointers where each of the slot in table
325 represents the packet type value.
327 Same could be done with notify packets which has big switch
328 statement too. Same kind of table of notify callbacks could be
331 o The parser callback in the server will add a timeout task for
332 all packets. It will require registering and allocating a
333 new task to the SilcSchedule. Maybe, at least, for server
334 and router packets the parser would be called immediately
335 instead of adding it to the scheduler with 0 timeout. It
336 should be analyzed too how slow the task registering process
337 actually is, and find out ways to optimize it.
339 o The SERVER_SIGNOFF notify handing is not optimal, because it'll
340 cause sending of multiple SIGNOFF notify's instead of the one
341 SERVER_SIGNOFF notify that the server received. This should be
342 optimized so that the only SERVER_SIGNOFF is sent and not
343 SIGNOFF of notify at all (using SIGNOFF takes the idea about
344 SERVER_SIGNOFF away entirely).
346 o Add SilcAsyncOperation to utility library. Any function that takes
347 callback as an argument must return SilcAsyncOperation.
351 o Cipher optimizations (asm, that this) at least for i386 would be nice.
353 o Add builtin SOCKS and HTTP Proxy support, well the SOCKS at least.
354 SILC currently supports SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 but it needs to be compiled