TODO After 1.0 ============== A rough list of stuff that is going to be done to SILC after 1.0 or at least could be done. o Implement the defined SilcDH API. The definition is in lib/silccrypt/silcdh.h. o X.509 certificate support. SILC protocol supports certificates and it would be great to have support for them. This is a big task as support has to be made for ASN.1 as well. I've looked into OpenSSL package as it has X.509 certificate support (and ASN.1 as well). The code does not look very good to my eye but it has some potentials. This should be looked at more closely. Naturally own SILC Certificate API has to be defined regardles what the actual X.509 library is (OpenSSL X.509 or something else). Other choice is to write own X.509 library but I'm not going to do it - I can help to migrate the OpenSSL X.509 into SILC and I can help if someone would like to write the X.509 library - but I'm not going to start writing one myself. Anyhow, the OpenSSL X.509 lib should be checked. Other package that should be checked is the NSS's X509 library, which I like more over OpenSSL package. o SSH2 public keys support, allowing the use of SSH2 public keys in SILC. o OpenPGP certificate support, allowing the use of PGP public keys in SILC. o Compression routines are missing. The protocol supports packet compression thus it must be implemented. SILC Zip API must be defined. o Optimizations in Libraries o There is currently three (3) allocations per packet in the silc_packet_receive_process, which is used to process and dispatch all packets in the packet queue to the parser callback function. First allocation is for parse_ctx, second for the SilcPacketContext, and third for packet->buffer where the actual data is saved. The parse_ctx allocation can be removed by adding it as a structure to the SilcPacketContext. When the SilcPacketContext is allocated there is space for the parse context already. The silc_packet_context_alloc could have a free list of packet contexts. If free packet context is found from the list it is returned instead of allocating a new one. The library could at first allocate them and save them to the free list until enough contexts for smooth processing exists in the list. This would remove a big allocation since the structure is quite big, and even bigger if it would include the parse_ctx. The packet->buffer can be optimized too if the SilcBuffer interface would support free lists as well. Maybe such could be done in the same way as for SilcPacketContext. The silc_buffer_alloc would check free list before actually allocating new memory. Since the packets in the SILC protocol usually are about the same size (due to padding) it would be easy to find suitable size buffer from the free list very quickly. These naturally cause the overal memory consumption to grow but would take away many allocations that can be done several times in a second (see also ~/silcpacket). o Move the actual file descriptor task callback (the callback that handles the incoming data, outgoing data etc, that is implemnted in server and client separately (silc_server_packet_process and silc_client_packet_proces)) to the low level socket connection handling routines, and create an interface where the application can register a callbacks for incoming data, outoing data and EOF receiving, which the library will call when necessary. This way we can move the data handling in one place. o Add silc_id_str2id to accept the destination buffer as argument and thus not require any memory allocation. Same will happen with silc_id_payload_* functions. o Remove the `truelen' field from SilcBuffer as it is entirely redundant since we can get the true length of the buffer by doing buffer->end - buffer->header. Add SILC_BUFFER_TRUELEN macro instead. Consider also removing `len' field too since it effectively is buffer->tail - buffer->data, and adding SILC_BUFFER_LEN macro can do the same. These would save totally 8 bytes of memory per buffer. o Optimizations in Server o Remove the big switch statement from the function silc_server_packet_parse_type and replace it with predefined table of function pointers where each of the slot in table represents the packet type value. Same could be done with notify packets which has big switch statement too. Same kind of table of notify callbacks could be done as well. o The parser callback in the server will add a timeout task for all packets. It will require registering and allocating a new task to the SilcSchedule. Maybe, at least, for server and router packets the parser would be called immediately instead of adding it to the scheduler with 0 timeout. It should be analyzed too how slow the task registering process actually is, and find out ways to optimize it. o The SERVER_SIGNOFF notify handing is not optimal, because it'll cause sending of multiple SIGNOFF notify's instead of the one SERVER_SIGNOFF notify that the server received. This should be optimized so that the only SERVER_SIGNOFF is sent and not SIGNOFF of notify at all (using SIGNOFF takes the idea about SERVER_SIGNOFF away entirely). o Add SilcAsyncOperation to utility library. Any function that takes callback as an argument must/should return SilcAsyncOperation (see ~/silcasync). o Rewrite SilcProtocol to be SilcFSM (see ~/silcfsm). o Do some scheduler optimizations and interface changes (see ~/silcschedule). o Change the lib/silccore/silcpacket.[ch] interfaces (see ~/silcpacket). o Add abstract SilcStream and SilcSocketStream (see ~/silcstream). o Change some of the SILC Net interfaces (see ~/silcnet). o Add DSS support. o SILC RNG does not implement random seed files, and they should be implemented. o Cipher optimizations (asm, that this) at least for i386 would be nice. o Add builtin SOCKS and HTTP Proxy support, well the SOCKS at least. SILC currently supports SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 but it needs to be compiled in separately. o EPOC specific additions/changes required: o lib/silcutil/epoc routines missing or not completed. o The PKCS#1 also calls global RNG (even though it is not used currently in SILC, the interface allows its use). o Something needs to be thought to the logging globals as well, like silc_debug etc. They won't work on EPOC. Perhaps logging and debugging is to be disabled on EPOC. o Check whether we can fully comply with RFC 2779. TODO in SILC Protocol ===================== o Inviting and banning by public key should be made possible. To be included in protocol version 1.2. o UTF-8 support/requirement for nicknames & channel names. UTF-8 support in terminals and OS's are so hazy that this matter is left for consideration in next version of the protocol (1.2). For good UTF-8 reference and tutorial see: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html. What should CLI application do if it receives nickname that it cannot display without messing up the terminal? If UTF-8 is mandatory in SILC then SILC clients cannot be allowed to start on terminals that do not support UTF-8 (which renders 98% of users unable to use CLI SILC app without hacking their environment). See also site http://gratrix.net/unicode/