Building Internet Firewalls, 2nd Edition

Chapter 19. Real-Time Conferencing Services

Services like the Web, electronic mail, and newsgroups allow people to send each other messages that will be read at later times, but what if you want to send an immediate message or have a discussion instead? Several services available on the Internet allow people to interact in real time on the Internet, ranging from “chat rooms” where people can send text messages to teleconferencing programs with video, audio, and whiteboard facilities.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

IRC is a multi-user text-based real-time conferencing system. Users run IRC client programs to connect to IRC servers. IRC servers can be arranged in a spanning tree and talk to each other to pass messages to all of the clients; these days, many IRC servers are independent and don’t take part in a tree. Figure 19.1 shows how the IRC servers are connected. Clients might connect to any of these servers.

Figure 19.1. IRC server tree

Most of the security problems with IRC are related to who uses it and how, not to the protocol per se. As we mentioned in Chapter 2, many clients allow servers far more access to local resources (files, processes, programs, etc.) than they should, and a malicious server can wreak havoc with a weak or poorly configured client. Further, some of the frequent users of IRC have a nasty habit of persuading new users to naively run commands that those users ...