SILCER, Secure Internet Live Conferencing Client

Welcome to the SILCER project web page.

So, what is it all about ?

It is a fact that most of Internet users are taking a part in live discussions and chats, phenomena called Internet Relay Chat (IRC). However, it is a fact that all their messages in a public / private conversation, and even passwords that are sent for identification are traveling over one very insecure medium, that is Internet by itself. It is also fact that all those messages are not protected in any way, which leads us to a conclusion that one can be object of many malicious attacks. For example, attacker could intercept message sent by client in the moment when client is trying to identify his nickname to a nickserv, or even worse, when trying to identify as owner of a chat channel.

SILC (stands for Secure Internet Live Conferencing) is a new protocol created by Mr. Pekka Riikonen that intends to be future of Internet real-time chats, voice and video conferencing. Indeed, SILC protocol, as described in white paper, according to its characteristics is a great candidate for such title. Main argument of SILC is cryptographic protection of all levels involved in one chat network, from low-level ip protocols to a high-level application protocol. SILC also supports IPv6.

However, the truth is that SILC is not yet fully standardized and for sure not yet widely adopted. This results with no support from developers which would develop user-friendly clients for such networks. Although there exist few clients like Irrsi, Silsa or Bombyx, either they are not user-friendly by all means (Irssi) or not finished, but rather limited to basic functionality (Silsa and Bombyx). Thus, all of them are written in C/C++ language, meaning that they ARE platform-dependent.

SILCER project tries to develop new, user-friendly and portable client for SILC network. Main argument is usage of Java programming language and its graphical toolkit Swing. But, there is a lot of job to do. Since existing SILC toolkit is written in C/C++, new, Java based toolkit has to be written from scratch. In order to do so, project needs team of Java programmers willing to separate some time for a benefit of Open Source community and for benefit of all people that are chatting over Internet. Future plan involves creation of SILCER Java applet that could be ran by any user running web browser that supports Java.

If you are interested, please notify us:

Srdjan Rajcevic, rsrdjan@devel.rsrdjan.com , tCX # SILC, [project administrator and developer]

Dejan Lekic, dejan@fltk.net , Dejan # SILC, [project administrator and developer]