In the latest months, I have been using IRC almost daily.
Before, I had used it only a few times. I only knew that this protocol is old, actually older than me 😄.
And I immediately saw that it lacks many of the features of modern systems.
Certificate authentication
One above all is registration and authentication. Many networks implement it through the NickServ user.
However, the authentication would involve sending the password as a message. Therefore, another mechanism based on a self-signed certificate is often preferred.
I am on OFTC, and t hey have a guide, which I initially followed (except for the algorithm: I changed rsa:2048 with ed25519).
Beware that this command does not ask for a passphrase! This was good enough for me since I was running HexChat on my PC, on which I use full-disk encryption.
You may want to encrypt the private key instead, and it is best to do it at the creation time.
Offline messages
But sadly, IRC does not have a feature that many (me included) take for granted today: offline messages. … [Leggi il resto]
