InvisibleNet Presents IIP

An anonymous submitter writes: "A new and ever growing project has launched into the alternative network realm, changing the pace by focusing directly on speech, rather than file sharing. The Invisible Irc Project, a peer distributed secure and anonymous internet relay chat network has popped up at some of the recent conventions this past year. The creator, and project leader, known as 0x90, has been seen at CodeCon 2002 introducing it to the public, at that time in more of a primitive state, and today, almost a year later, the software has noticeably been more usable by the masses. 0x90 just gave a talk at ToorCon 2K2 on designing a robust & secure Peer-2-Peer framework, and their InvisibleNet site just released new software along with a two part interview that was taken in July. A good read that details the depths of their project, including the state it is in now, and the future vision of a privately distributed steganographical crypto-net. I have tried out the software and it is very easy to set up, and it supports the freenixes, OS X, and Win32 machines. You can use any irc client with it seemlessly, and the cryptography is handled transparently within your "IIP" node. It's GPL so peer review is welcome, as it also states this on their site. It appears to have a nice community of users with a range of discussions. So if you have a bit of time on your hands to engage in some chatting online, give this a try. It's alternative, creative, and possibly a standard setting step to securing IRC as we know it."

Comments

Re:Clever, 0x90, but I'm changing my name to 0x120

[eddy]

0x90 is the instruction code for 'NOP' (No OPeration) on IA32.

In case anyone wondered. (I'm guessing... not)

mircryption - strong encryption suite for mIrc

[Anonymous Coward]

there are several extant irc encryption tools that work over normal irc servers.

one nice open source one (only runs on win32 with mIrc irc client):

http:\\mircryption.sourceforge.net

It worked Right away

[Buzz_Litebeer]

I find it a bit slower on the outset then regular IRC, but completely painless to run. Only a little more time to tell if it crashes because of the ./ effect. They also have a chanserve, nickserve named "Trent" if you are wondering, I havent tried to create a channel yet, but we shall see how it works.

Nickserv / Chanserv clone called Trent

[MiDS]

We have a nickserv/chanserv clone called Trent

For help: /squery trent help
To register your nick: /squery trent nickreg password
To identify: /squery trent identify password

See also the IIP manual

Re:Trillian

[Anonymous Coward]

Trillian is not secure at all, the SecureIM feature is a joke.

It's susceptable to man in the middle, and many other problems.

Re:Secret channels and practical uses?

[MiDS]

/mode +a will only work on !channels

to create a !channel type: /join !!channel
to join an existing !channel type: /join !channel

Then set mode +a: /mode !channel +a

Why? IRC weirdness.

Linux RPMS and a public server

[wstearns]

Linux RPMs of the tool can be found at http://www.stearns.org/iip/. Also, there's a public server at wstearns.stearns.org:6667

Re:A few more reasons this is not secure

[Jim McCoy]

You should be subscribed to coderpunks (coderpunks@toad.com) to get access to a large group of top-notch crypto people. The next list that is a necessity is the nym-ip list (nymip-res-group@nymip.org), which discusses anonymity networks. You should also be checking out proceedings of the Information Hiding workshops, Privacy Enhancing Technologies workshops, and hunt down the other research work by presenters at these conferences.

Re:I've been poking around the similar idea

[delta407]

This is something InvisibleNet still has to realize.

IIP2 is in the works which aims to include a completely different architecture. It will most likely be totally peer-to-peer (as in no distinction between clients, proxies, and servers; all nodes will share all roles) and incorporate a lexical routing system (addresses derived from channel or user names and routed accordingly).

Initial data gathered suggests that it could scale well, preserving low latency and reasonably high throughput.

Unfortunately, with this model, there are a few anonymity concerns -- the current issue being pondered is node discovery (how to keep an attacker from learning large numbers of nodes) and how to anonymously route messages back to the user. But don't worry, it's being worked on.

Replying to myself :)

[apankrat]

>>> you create trusted network of anonymous
>>How cany you both trusted and anonymous
>You trust those who you are proxying for.


Just to explain a bit more - every node would serve as a client and a proxy server.

As a client it would have at least one proxy node that it would use to communicate with the network on other side of the proxy. Client obviously cannot have an anonymity with the proxy, hense it must have a trust with proxy.

Consider the example - I have a number of friends (F) I trust. These friends have their own friends (FF) that I am neither trust nor is aware of . So F nodes will be serving as proxies for all communications happening between me and FF nodes. I will not know FF's identities, they will not know mine, but this all will work only if -I trust F- and -FF trust F-. See ?