On 2001.02.19 11:00:02 +0400 Lenny Cartier wrote:
[..]
> Description :
> SILC (Secure Internet Live Conferencing) is a protocol which provides
> secure
> conferencing services in the Internet over insecure channel. SILC is IRC
> like software
> although internally they are very different. Biggest similarity between
> SILC and IRC is that
> they both provide conferencing services and that SILC has almost same
> commands as
> IRC. Other than that they are nothing alike. Biggest differences are that
> SILC is secure
> what IRC is not in any way. The network model is also entirely different
> compared to IRC.
>
> SILC provides security services that any other conferencing protocol does
> not offer
> today. The most popular conferencing service, IRC, is entirely insecure.
> If you need
> secure place to talk to some people or to group of people over the
> Internet, IRC or any
> other conferencing service, for that matter, cannot be used. Anyone can
> see the
> messages and their contents in the IRC network. And the most worse case,
> some people
> is able to change the contents of the messages. Also, all the
> authentication data, such as,
> passwords are sent plaintext.
>
> SILC is a lot more than just about `encrypting the traffic'. That is easy
> enough to do with
> IRC, SSL and some ad hoc scripts, and even then the entire network cannot
> be secured,
> only part of it. SILC provides security services, such as, sending
> private messages
> entirely secure; no one can see the message except you and the real
> receiver of the
> message. SILC also provides same functionality for channels; no one
> except those clients
> joined to the channel may see the messages destined to the channel.
> Communication
> between client and server is also secured with session keys, and all
> commands,
> authentication data (such as passwords etc.) and other traffic is
> entirely secured. The
> entire network, and all parts of it, is secured. This is something that
> cannot be done
> currently with any other conferencing protocol, even when using the ad
> hoc scripts. :)
>
> SILC has secure key exchange protocol that is used to create the session
> keys for each
> connection. SILC also provides strong authentication based on either
> passwords or
> public key authentication. All authentication data is always encrypted in
> the SILC network.
> All connections has their own session keys, all channels has channel
> specific keys, and all
> private messages can be secured with private message specific keys.
new proposal for rpmlint : check description length (and width ?), to avoid
endless speech :-)
--
The probability of a hardware failure disappearing is inversely
proportional to the distance between the computer and the customer
engineer.
-- Murphy's Laws of Computer Programming n°18
