Secure Internet Live Conferencing protocol

The Secure Internet Live Conferencing (SILC) protocol is a new generation chat protocol which provides full featured conferencing services, just like any other contemporary chat protocol provides. In addition, it provides security by encrypting and authenticating the messages in the network. The security has been the primary goal of the SILC protocol and the protocol has been designed from the day one security in mind. All packets and messages travelling in the SILC Network are always encrypted and authenticated. The network topology is also different from for example IRC network. The SILCnetwork topology attempts to be more powerful and scalable than the IRC network. The basic purpose of the SILC protocol is to provide secure conferencingservices. The SILC Protocol have been developed as Open Source project. The protocol specifications are freely available and they have been submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF). The very first implementations of the protocol are also already available.

I.INTRODUCTION

                  SILC is a protocol which provides secure conferencing services on the Internet over insecure channel. SILC superficially resembles IRC, although they are very different internally. They both provide conferencing services and have almost the same set of commands. Other than that, they are nothing alike. The SILC is secure and the network model is entirely different compared to IRC.

                  SILC is much more than just about encrypting the traffic. That is easy enough to do with IRC and SSL hybrids, but even then the entire network cannot be secured, only part of it. SILC provides securityservices, 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. We are not aware of any other conferencing protocol providing same features at the present time.

   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. Each connection has their own session keys, all channels have channel specific keys, and all private messagescan be secured with private message specific keys.

II. Features of Secure Internet Live Conferencing

1. Normal conferencing services such as   private messages, channels, channel messages, etc. All traffic is secured and authenticated.

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